


Charlie Weasley and the Department of Mysteries

by peteryoushouldwrite



Series: Weasley's Wizard Woes [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Action/Adventure, Coming Out, M/M, Mystery, Romance, Wandlore (Harry Potter)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-06-23 10:34:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 55,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15604416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peteryoushouldwrite/pseuds/peteryoushouldwrite
Summary: After being spurned by his lover and fired from his job, Charlie Weasley is back in England living with his mother and working at the Department of Mysteries... no, not that Department of Mysteries, the bar, in Knockturn Alley. Unfortunately for Charlie, the publication of a new edition of the Sacred Twenty Eight means he'll find no rest at the Burrow, and he finds himself in the center of a feverish hunt for the Bloodwand, a mysterious artifact allegedly bound to the "purest" wizarding family.This story is marked as part of a series, but it is not necessary to read Percy Weasley's adventure to follow the events of this one.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Two big pieces of Charlie's character arc in this story are his struggle with alcohol addiction and his challenges with coming out to his family. Neither go smoothly, so if this isn't your cup of tea, please take care of yourselves and skip this one.

There were only four items left on Charlie Weasley's desk in the corner of his cabin, and he hated them all. He hated the candle for burning so damn bright, he hated the bottle of vodka for being too damn empty, and most of all, he hated the two wrinkled letters for being too smudged with, well, not tears. But something like tears. Something that might leak from a man's face after his last bottle of vodka was too damn empty.

Charlie rubbed his eyes, bleary with fatigue and the fading stupor of drink. His bags were packed. All his things had fit in four measly bags. Everything that is, minus the candle, the empty vodka bottle, and the two letters. Those had been too important to pack. Those he needed left out.

The vodka couldn't be packed, obviously, because a man shouldn't be reduced to rummaging every time he needed a drink. The candle he needed, because Hagrid had warned him not to cross booze with even a simple lumos spell. But the letters? He hadn't decided whether he should bring them or burn them.

He hated the letters. Truly. It was remarkable how two pieces of parchment with some ink could tear a man's life apart like fiendfyre, only faster and with less fanfare.

The first letter had been delivered by Theo's dignified barred owl two months prior, on a crisp September morning. Charlie had been smearing some salve on a fresh burn on his shoulder when the owl had swooped in the open window and dropped the letter, then flown back out without waiting to see if Charlie would write a response. Not that there was anything unusual about that. No owls lingered in dragon country.

 

 _Dearest Charlie_ , it began, with that strange slant of someone who wrote left handed.

_I am writing to share the news of my upcoming nuptials to Ms. Daphne Greengrass, in hopes that owls travel faster than rumors. In the wake of the publication of the Sacred Nineteen and my father's rapidly declining health, the time for me to honor my family's name and duties has come sooner for me, rather than later, as I had hoped. I must now marry. I ask that you understand not as a dear friend, but as a pureblood son._

_By no means do I wish for our affair to come to an end, only that it must grow into something new, as all things inevitably must. While my new filial responsibilities will make it impossible for us to visit with the regularity that has become our habit, there is no reason why "business" may not occasionally whisk me away to Romania and into your arms. I expect with decreased frequency our passion will grow even greater._

_I understand, and expect, that you may be angry with me for some time, and wish that you take as much time as you require to write your answer. Again, I offer my sincerest apologies for this turn of events, and ask that you think of the tremendous pressure placed on the sole heir of a dying father._

_Forever yours,_

_Theo_

 

Charlie felt his ears turn red and his hands shake as he turned the letter over and placed it face down. He desperately wanted to be angrier with Theo, but Theo was so damned nice and so damned understanding that he didn't know how.

The problem wasn't Theo, Charlie knew. He was the problem. His pride, more specifically. If he could just swallow his pride he might be able to accept Theo's offer that they only see each other occasionally. But Charlie was greedy, like dragons in the old stories. He didn't want to share. He had five brothers. He had shared enough, had enough of being one of many. He had thought, foolishly, it seemed, that once he was grown and away from Hogwarts he wouldn't have to share anymore. Yet here he was, being offered someone else's leavings, someone else's scraps. Daphne Greengrass' scraps.

Daphne Greengrass. The thought of her filled him with rage at his empty Vodka bottle. On impulse he grabbed the bottle and flung it against the wall, finding some satisfaction in the sound of its shattering and the tinkling of shards on the wood floor. He had never known who she was, never cared who she was. There was nothing sillier than a grown man feeling jealous  of an adolescent girl. Yet he was jealous, and ashamed to boot. He knew it was a cycle, but he also knew there wasn't a damn thing he could do to break it.

Then there was the other letter. It was only a few days old. This one had been hand delivered by the grounds courier, who must have sneaked a look as she always did, and knew what the letter said. She'd refused to look Charlie in the eye when she handed it to him.

_C. Weasley._

_Upon completion of the investigation of the events of September 13th involving the improper harnessing of a Welsh Green leading to the injury of three hands, the committee has sufficient reason to believe that Handler Weasley's abilities had been impaired by the use of alcohol or some other prohibited substance. In light of your overall record, the committee is only asking that you take an extended leave of absence of. If at the end of leave you feel prepared to return to work you may plead your case on February the 24th, pending approval of the committee._

_Sincerely,_

_Rolf Evanovitch_

_Chief Handler_

 

Six months without pay. Six months without dragons. Charlie didn’t know who he was without dragons. Even during Voldemort’s return he’d continued his life mostly uninterrupted, unchanged. A demotion he could have handled, but a mandatory leave of absence? What if at the end of his leave the committee denied his plea, and has career was over? What then?

He shook his head, banishing that train of thought back to its dark place. There was no point worrying about that now. Now he had to decide whether to bring the letters with him or leave them somewhere to rot. Not that it mattered. They were already burned into his brain, and all the vodka in the world wouldn’t fix that.

Charlie picked them up, one in each hand, looking back and forth between them. He held Theo’s letter out, tipping the corner into the candle. The parchment crackled and sputtered as it caught fire. The flame spread across the letter, slowly swallowing Theo’s handwriting.

Something in Charlie panicked as the letter burned, and he snatched the letter away from the candle and smothered the flame. He tucked Theo’s letter into deep in a concealed coat pocket, and crammed Rolf’s letter in one of his bags. He desperately wished he could have just burned the damn things. It would be cleaner that way. But what if Theo changed his mind, and Charlie had burned his letter? Or what if he forgot the date of his appeal?

Charlie blew out the candle, then grabbed his bags and disapparated.

 

 

Like many wizards, Charlie didn’t much care for apparating. He had long since grown accustomed to the vertigo, but what he could never get used to was how it denied him any time to mentally prepare for where he was going. No time to rehearse pleasantries, speeches, and lies. But flying from Romania to Britain by broom just wasn’t practical.

He arrived in the Burrow and was promptly wrapped in a bone crushing hug.

“Hey mum,” he managed with what little air was left in his lungs.

“Charlie! Let me look at you,” she said, pushing him out to arm’s length and studying him carefully.

“What time is it here?” he asked, squinting in the bright light and prying himself out of his mother’s arms.

“Six. Quarter after, really. Hungry?”

Charlie had never resented the Burrow’s many west facing windows before, but there were flooding the living room with a hellish yellow glare that seemed intent on burning the traces of vodka from his blood.

“Mum, you’re staring.”

She sniffed indignantly. “It’s just been so long! To think I only got your owl yesterday and here you are today. I can’t believe Rolf would agree to let you leave for so long!”

Charlie smiled. “I couldn’t believe it either. But I’ve worked for him for how many years now? And the only time away I’ve had were for weddings. Hardly vacations. Can I put my bags in my old room, or is that storage or something now?”

“Oh stop. You know your room is just as you left it.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” he muttered, glancing at the stairs behind her. “Thanks.”

He hoisted his bags under his arm and avoided her gaze as he maneuvered sideways out of the kitchen. He was halfway through negotiating the odd angled turn at the first landing when he saw something horrifying, something which shook him to the the core.

“Mum? What is this… thing?”

“Yes dear?” she called as her head appeared at the base of the stairs. “Oh, that. Do you like it? The painters finished it Tuesday, just in time for you to see it!”

“It looks like a family tree.”

“Well that’s because it is a family tree. Bill and Fleur simply could not stop talking about it so I had one commissioned for them too.”

Charlie ran a finger under the crude portrait of his face, or rather, a portrait of a teenage version of him. Beside it was a painted frame, empty but waiting for whomever he paired off with. He had a feeling it would remain empty for a long time.

“I bet they adore it,” he said.

He hauled his bags up the next flight and took a left at the end of the hall, into his old room.

It hadn’t always been his room. He’d had a room all to himself, until Ginny was born, then he moved into Bill’s room. They figured that since Bill and Charlie would be off to Hogwarts only a few years later, it made sense that they share for a while.

Both he and Bill had been furious at first. Well, they at least made a show of being angry. But bunking with Bill had been fun, and he imagined infinitely preferable to rooming with Percy or Ron. Bill and Charlie’s room was about the only bedroom in the Burrow with two windows, so they split the room down the middle, Charlie on the left, Bill on the right. He tossed his bags on Bill’s bed and collapsed onto his own.

His mother was right. Their room was just as he and Bill had left it all those years ago, only tidier. Charlie suspected she secretly entertained the notion that the Weasley diaspora would someday return and take up residence at the Burrow, and she remained constantly prepared for that day.

Molly peered around the doorframe.

“Are you hungry? I have stew going,” she offered.

“Thanks, Mum, but no. Not in the mood for food. Think I might go to sleep, actually.”

Her face fell. “Oh. Okay. Well, help yourself to some stew, whenever you want.”

“Thanks mum,” Charlie said. She pulled the door closed and Charlie buried his face in a quilted pillow. He thought wistfully about his empty vodka bottle as his head began to throb.

 

Charlie awoke just in time to throw up an arm to bat aside a quaffle before it smashed his face.

“Oh good. You’re up.”

Charlie growled and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. His eyeballs felt too big for his skull, and it hurt to open them too far. When he saw who threw the quaffle, he grabbed a pillow and covered his face again.

“Go away.”

“Glad to see you’ve made yourself at home.”

“Fine. Go away and go fuck yourself.”

Charlie had indeed made himself at home, and he didn’t care what Bill had to say about it. When the average Weasley grew taller and thinner, Charlie had grown shorter and stockier. The average Weasley bed was less than optimal for someone with his build. After sleeping the first night in his old bed with two limbs hanging over the edge at any given time, Charlie came up with the brilliant plan to push both beds together. There was a bump in the middle, but at least he felt like he had an adult sized bed.

“Don’t see why I shouldn’t,” he added.

Bill picked up the quaffle and lobbed it at Charlie’s head again.

“I would say you throw like my little sister,” he said, deflecting it again, “but that would be a compliment. You throw like Ron.”

Bill feigned an injured look. “I don’t want you to pull a muscle this early in the morning.  Mum says you’ve been sleeping a lot.”

“So? I am on vacation, you know.”

“Uh huh. Vacation.”

“Bill, why are you pestering me like this so early in the morning? Is that any way to greet family?”

“Charlie. It’s eleven o’clock.”

Charlie snorted and rolled his eyes. He padded over to the dresser and rifled through the drawers for a shirt.

“Fine. I’m on vacation and I’m still adjusting to Britain time.”

“Romania’s only two hours ahead.”

“Just because you’re a banker now,” he continued, gesturing at Bill’s plain shirt and tie, “doesn’t mean everyone else in the world needs to keep to a nine to five.” He picked out a red sweater and pulled it over his head.

“And just because you spent some time around dragons doesn’t mean you have to act like one. You’re upsetting mum. Come downstairs. We need to get some breakfast in you.”

Charlie grumbled incoherently but followed Bill down the stairs, past that awful family tree, toward the smell of frying bacon.

“Oh, good, you’re up!” Molly said, and heaped some bacon onto a plate and handed it to Charlie. He grunted his thanks and fell into a chair at the table. “And Charlie? I know it’s not a concern right now, but when Harry and Ginny come on Saturday nights, that’s Harry’s chair, dear.”

Charlie shot an incredulous look at Bill, who was busy hiding behind a coffee mug.

“Don’t worry, mum, I’ll be sure to scrub out the smell.”

“Oh, that’s not what I meant, Charlie. I just don’t want you to be alarmed if you have to relocate.”

“Thanks for the warning.” He crunched a strip of bacon, wondering if the pounding in his head would ever go away. He really should have paid more attention in potions. His mother was perfectly capable of mixing up a headache tonic, but if he asked her to brew something for him she would just fret and hover, and that would be even more insufferable than the headache.

“So, Charlie, you got any plans for your vacation?” Bill asked, placing what Charlie felt was an inappropriate emphasis on the word “vacation.” Charlie wondered if he would look so smug if Charlie kicked the chair out from under him.

“Really hadn’t given it much thought. Thought it was time for a change in scenery, is all.”

“A man can get into a lot of trouble in six months,” Bill said, tapping his chin. Despite the shirt and tie, the scars, and the adult haircut, Charlie could only see the thirteen-year-old older brother who tripped compulsively. It made his unsolicited advice maddening.

“Can’t be much worse than what I do for a living,” Charlie said, waving his left arm, the one which had borne the brunt of his near misses over the years and had the burn scars to show it.

Bill pulled out a chair next to Charlie and leaned in.

“Listen close now,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper, craning his head to verify their mother was preoccupied with a particularly stubborn stain on a pan. “Mum might stay off your case for a few more days, but pretty soon the novelty of you being home again will wear off and she’s going to start pushing her agenda.”

“What do you mean, her agenda?”

“Let’s just say she’s pretty eager to fill in the blanks on that family tree.”

Charlie froze, a strip of bacon inches from his mouth.

“You’re kidding.”

Bill shook his head, quickly donning a smile and waving as Molly looked up from her dishes.

“The magic of the painting will automatically draw someone you start dating, so she’ll know if you’re lying.”

“Any suggestions?” Charlie asked, biting the bacon and mustering a similar fake smile for his mother. Satisfied they weren’t whispering to each other anymore, she began humming and opened a spice cupboard, looking at the overstuffed shelves like a lord surveying her territory.

“You need a job. It’ll keep you out of the house.”

Charlie snorted. “I have a job. At the dragon sanctuary. Where I’ve worked for many years now, you may recall.”

“Sure. Whatever. But I doubt you’re getting a six month paid leave, and I’ve seen your Gringotts vault, and I’m telling you that you can’t afford six months without pay.”

“What the hell, Bill? Why were you looking at my vault?”

Bill shrugged and took another sip of coffee. “One, it’s not really a vault when it’s almost empty. Two, I consider it a perk of the job to be able to keep tabs on people. But seriously, have you given no mind to your future? What have you been spending your money on? The time to start saving for retirement is now.”

“Really, Bill?” Charlie shook his head. “The time to start saving for retirement is now? What is that shit?  What happened to the cool brother?”

“Like it or not, that shit is true.”

“Well, like it or not, the dragon sanctuary pays me in a roof over my head and food in my belly. My actual salary is a pittance. So no, my vault isn’t in the best shape,” Charlie said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

“Well then, you definitely need to get a job unless you want to be living on handouts from Mum and Dad.”

“Clearly you have something in mind.”

“I do, as a matter of fact. Mum said you’ve been sleeping pretty much all day every day, so I did some asking around.”

“You did no such thing,”Charlie said with a glower, watching his mother rearrange the spice cupboard.

“No need to thank me.” Bill smiled and downed the dregs of his coffee with a wince. “Anyway, I did some asking around with my clients, and as it turns out, a bar I brokered a deal for is in need of a bouncer, and I think you’re surly enough for the job.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Don’t tell me you’re not surly. And why do you suddenly think I’m joking all the time? Seriously, I know you love caring for magical creatures. A drunk wizard is a very particularly dangerous breed of magical creature, and I think your background gives you the skill set you need to be successful in this line of work.”

“What else you got?”


	2. Chapter 2

“Did you just cast lumos? I think my wand tip lit up…”

Charlie rolled his eyes, sighing as he heard yet another terrible pick up line. He would get a free shot at the end of his shift, but he was beginning to think it would take something stiffer to forget the horrible puns.

The bartender, Jarvis, caught Charlie’s eye and jerked his chin at a shamble of a man sitting at the end of the bar whose grumbling was starting to approach ravings. Patrons were slowly scooting their stools away and casting resentful glares. Charlie sighed and edged around a table of old witches who looked like they probably only had one tooth between the three of them.

“Look like it’s time for you to go home, friend,” Charlie said, clapping a heavy hand on the man’s shoulder. He looked like a profoundly short version of Hagrid, with gray hair. Smelled like him too.

The man turned and stared at Charlie with rheumy, bloodshot eyes. He grumbled something about Unspeakables and chariots.

“Let me help you out of your seat,” Charlie said. He tightened his hand around the man’s arm and began lifting him out of the stool. He didn’t want the man to think he had options. 

The drunk flung his meaty forearm at Charlie with an angry snarl. Charlie narrowly ducked and slammed his own shoulder into the drunk’s side, sending him sprawling to the floor and knocking the stool into the counter. The table with the three old witches cheered and raised their drinks.

Charlie reached down and pulled the man to his feet, and marched him to the door, ignoring his loud groans and the spitting, and shoved him outside, drawing another round of applause. He returned to his post in a gloomy corner behind the bar, next to Artemis, a veteran bouncer at the Department of Mysteries. They had a good view of the entire bar from that corner, as good of a view as one could hope for, considering the establishment was a maze of low walls and dangling glowballs designed to break up sight lines and keep visibility low and anonymity high. 

“Was that better? Charlie asked when he returned to his post in the gloomy corner behind the bar. 

She shrugged. “Getting there. Make sure they hit the ground outside when you throw them out. This is Knockturn Alley, not the Leaky Cauldron. We want the bastard to wake up tomorrow and see bruises, so he knows he did wrong. We also want ne'er-do-wells on the street outside seeing drunks tossed out.”

Charlie nodded and checked his watch. Jarvis would announce final call soon, then he could get something to wet his own tongue. They didn’t carry his favorite vodka, but he’d spied something on the bottom shelf that looked like it was strong enough to do the trick.

He leaned against the wall, then realized what he’d done and stood straight again, wincing as his hair caught on the sticky wall. He tried his best to look imposing, watching Artemis out of the corner of his eye, mimicking the set of her square jaw and the slight scowl. She kept her thick arms crossed over her thick leather vest, which bulged with pockets and pouches, making her broad shoulders look broader. She’d have been a good beater, Charlie decided. 

“Ever have problems clearing people out at the end of the night?” Charlie asked, as patrons started to pull on their jackets and drop coins on the tables, filing out with hoods drawn low. 

Artemis twitched her head no. “Even the drunks know it’s best to leave. It’s not good to be caught drunk and alone so late in Knockturn Alley.”

“Is it actually dangerous? I always figured people were just being dramatic.”

“Not if you’ve got your wits about you. We’re in the middle of the city, after all, and there are plenty of people on the streets at night, nursing a drink or a discrete conversation, but no one’s going to look out for you but you.”

“How about for you? People give you trouble?”

Artemis snorted and shook her head. “Nah. Squib or not, the Department of Mysteries has a lot of secrets on a lot of people, and they don’t want to be on bad terms with the establishment. Besides, lot of folks think hitting a squib is like kicking a puppy, and even the ones I rough up in here don’t want to admit they got hit by a squib.”

Charlie nodded, wondering what the real Department of Mysteries thought about the bar in Knockturn Alley with the same name. He didn’t know any Unspeakables, or rather, he didn’t knowingly know any Unspeakables, so he doubted he would ever find out. 

“Final call!” Jarvis roared from behind the bar, his sweaty bald head shaking. Sound travelled strangely in the Department of Mysteries, and it seemed as though Jarvis’ voice came from ten feet to the left. “Order your final drinks and get the hell out!”

Charlie smiled. He supposed the Department of Mysteries, bar or otherwise, had never been known for outstanding customer service. Reputation was everything, even in Knockturn Alley. Especially in Knockturn Alley.

The last drinkers stepped up to the bar and got their cups topped off before shuffling out the door, a blast of cold sending a shiver down Charlie’s spine every time the door opened and closed. He would wear his coat next time. He would probably look more imposing as a bouncer in his skroot plate trenchcoat than in one of his mother’s knitted sweaters anyway. 

“So what do we do for cleanup around here?” Charlie asked. 

Artemis smirked but didn’t answer, grabbing a long brown overcoat off a peg behind the counter and swinging it onto her shoulders. 

“If you clean I have to pay you more, and I don’t want to pay you more,” Jarvis said, flicking his wand and setting a dozen rags to work on tables. “What’s your drink for the road?”

Charlie pointed at the dusky brown bottle on the bottom shelf he’d been eyeing, and was about to slide onto a bar stool when Jarvis stopped him with a glare.

“I said for the road,” Jarvis said.

Just as well, Charlie thought. He was too sober to try to make small talk with a man like Jarvis anyway. He stood as he waited for Jarvis to conjure up a small tin cup and pour him a shot. Jarvis held out the cup and Charlie took it. He frowned at the pitifully small serving, but free liquor was free liquor. Being able to smell it all night without having any himself had been pure torture, and he would take what he could get. Jarvis gave him enough to take the edge off, and that would have to do. 

Charlie emptied the cup and banged it on the counter, closing his eyes as the liquor burned down the back of his throat. There wasn’t much, but it was strong stuff. 

He grabbed his coat and followed Artemis out a narrow stone staircase leading out the back of the Department of Mysteries. She grunted her goodbye as they stepped into the alley and she disappeared into the shadows. 

Charlie rubbed his hands together and pulled his coat as tight as he could around his neck. He should have known it was going to be cold in London at three in the morning. The liquor helped, but he could feel every opening and loose seam in his coat. Dogs barked a couple streets over and Charlie ventured off into the night.

No matter how cold it was, he couldn’t go home yet. Charlie needed a drink. Or another drink, depending on how he counted. Regardless, he hadn’t had enough, and he needed more to get him through the night. 

There had to be somewhere in Knockturn Alley that served this late, but he wasn’t so desperate that he was willing to explore Knockturn Alley in the dead of night. He wondered if George would have anything stashed in his flat over Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes, but he didn’t think George would be in a sharing mood if he barged in at this hour. 

The Leaky Cauldron must still be serving, he realized. They had travelers coming and going at all hours, and they must have their kitchen, and more importantly their taps, running to accommodate their clientele. If he had to get drunk off butterbeer, so be it. 

He walked quickly with renewed vigor, tucking his wand against his forearm just in case his trip out of Knockturn was more eventful than he hoped. There were a handful of people on the streets, but just a handful. They seemed as interested in keeping to themselves as he was.

The gloom seemed to lift immediately as he stepped onto Diagon Alley, with its well maintained streets and clean lamps. The road was wider than Knockturn, so it didn’t have the same claustrophobic feeling.  Knockturn was clearly a much older part of London, and the years had not been kind.

It felt strange being in Diagon Alley as an adult. Charlie knew plenty of people lived and worked there, but Charlie had only ever gone during annual school supply shopping trips. He wasn’t really sure what people did there if not to buy books or robes.

After what felt like forever in the winter cold Charlie saw the sign for the Leaky Cauldron, dimly lit by a battered lantern swinging on a creaking chain. A wiry man darted out of the shadows of a nearby alley and pulled down his hood as he hauled the door open. The warm yellow light lit up his face briefly before he disappeared inside. 

Charlie raised an eyebrow. He didn’t recall noticing attractive men before in Diagon Alley. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. He had noticed them plenty over the years. He just didn’t realize that’s what he was doing.  

He stepped inside the Cauldron and frowned, trying to decide where to sit. He wanted to sit alone in a corner, where he could brood and sulk and glare at no one in particular. 

“Late night again, Gabriel?” Tom asked the man who’d entered moments before Charlie. He nodded and ran a hand absentmindedly through his pale blonde hair as he pulled out a stool at the bar.

What the hell, Charlie thought. He could sit alone in a corner to brood and sulk and glare at no one in particular whenever he wanted. He swallowed hard and took a seat at the other end of the bar, watching Tom and Gabriel out of the corner of his eye while perusing the liquor shelves for something that might take the edge off without completely incapacitating him.

“Got a new shipment of cores in today. Weird ones, too.”

“Yeah? Like what?” Tom asked, sliding him a plate with a slab of meat drenched in sauce.

Gabriel scoffed. “Like I can say that out loud? Gregorovitch has got ears everywhere. If he put half as much work into developing his own craft as he put into spying on me to steal my ideas, he could put me out of business.”

Charlie swung around on his stool, unable to resist.

“Wait, wait,” he interrupted, his curiosity having gotten the better of him. “You’re Gabriel Ollivander?”

“Who’s asking?” Gabriel narrowed his eyes. “You one of Gregorovitch’s?”

Charlie shook his head. 

Gabriel straightened his glasses, eyes wandering down Charlie’s face and his shoulder. “You don’t look his sort. Yeah, I’m Gabriel Ollivander.”

“I always figured you would be, I don’t know, eighty five or something like that.”

“You really think I’m eighty five? I’m actually only eighty three,” Gabriel said quietly, biting his lip.

“Really?”

“No, of course not!” Gabriel said, slapping the counter. “I’m thirty one. My father was old when I came along.”

Charlie nodded. “Tom, can I have a pour of that one? No, the green bottle. Thanks. I’m Charlie Weasley, by the way. I don’t know if you remember, but we’ve corresponded before. I filled some of your orders at the Dragon Sanctuary in Romania.”

“Remarkable!” Gabriel wiped his mouth and reached down the counter to shake Charlie’s hand. He had the long, tapered hands of someone suited for precision and detailed work. “I did some remarkable stuff with that last batch of dragon heartstring cores. Not that any of those snot-nosed eleven year olds care! But how could they know, having never held a wand before? How can they know what a remarkable thing I’ve created for them?”

“Sounds frustrating.”

“It is!” Gabriel agreed. “But they say it is the curse of a true artist to be unappreciated.”

“So I’ve always wondered. What do you do the rest of the year? There’s only one season really where you do a lot of sales of new wands right?”

Gabriel finished chewing, then set down his fork. “Quite a lot, actually. Of course, I do a lot of experimentation with different woods and wands, but that’s mostly recreational. My father made so many damn wands that I could probably retire without ever making a new wand. But he only used three cores. Doesn’t leave a lot of room for imagination or improvement.

“That’s only a fraction of my time though. Lately I get called out to a lot of Pureblood estates who’re convinced they have this wand from that legend or that wand from this legend. I charge for appraisals, and theoretically buy a wand of strange make here or there.”

Charlie took a sip of his drink and frowned. Like he feared, it wasn’t as strong as he had hoped, but it would get him by.

“That’s interesting,” he said. “It surprises me though that old Pureblood families would be humble enough to open their home to someone who might tell them their stuff is worthless.”

“I was too, at first,” Gabriel admitted. “Once I actually got inside their houses, though, it started to make sense. A lot of these families have the name, but don’t have the fortune anymore to support the archetypal Pureblood lifestyle, so they’re digging through their attics for something of value, anything to help them reclaim their old glamour. And once the story of the Deathly Hallows turned out to be very true, people other than wandmakers are starting to get interested in investigating some of the other legendary wands.”

Gabriel dropped his napkin on his plate and pushed it away.

“Delicious, as usual, Tom. Now, if you could spare a glass of port, I think that would really make my evening. Thank you.”

“You ever find anything?” Charlie asked. He realized he had nearly forgotten his drink. He took another sip to fix that. 

Gabriel shook his head grimly. “I wish,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve found some good stuff, interesting stuff. Woods I wouldn’t have thought to use, cores that are actually more stable than conventional wandlore suggests, but legendary wands? Alas, no. But still, every week since the  _ Sacred Nineteen _ was published I get an owl from this person or that claiming to have the Bloodwand that book describes, all so people can claim to be from the supposed one true family.”

“The damned  _ Sacred Nineteen _ ,” Charlie groaned, rolling his eyes. “I’m already sick of the  _ Sacred Nineteen _ .”

Gabriel shrugged and drank the last of his port. “Like it or not, we’re both in it. They’ve even marked the Weasley’s as being at risk.”

“What does that even mean? There are six of us left!”

“That may be, but you and your siblings apparently aren’t very good at locking down purebloods. You’re in danger of being demoted to half-blood status.” Gabriel said, glancing down at his watch and cringing. “Ooh, I’ve been out far too late. Well, Mr. Weasley, it was a pleasure meeting you in person. You’re far better looking than you’re handwriting would suggest.”

Charlie took Gabriel’s extended hand and gave it a squeeze. “Until next time.”

Gabriel nodded and put on his coat. “Until next time. Your family find any strange wands in the attic, you call me before that snake Gregorovitch, and I’ll cut you a deal.”

Charlie watched him go took another swallow of his drink. He wondered if he’d had too much to apparate home.

“Tom? Mind if I use the Floo?”


	3. Chapter 3

Charlie did not wake up with a quaffle to the face that morning, mostly because he had the presence of mind to clumsily bar the the door with a chair under the doorknob before he’d collapsed into his bed. Instead of a quaffle, he awoke to pounding. Not that that was entirely unusual. He’d grown accustomed to the splitting morning headaches. But this pounding was sharper, faster. As the pounding sped up, he realized someone was knocking at the door. 

He groaned loudly and rolled over, hoping whoever it was would take the hint and leave him in peace.

“Charlie! Your eggs are getting cold, and I’ll not stand about wasting the morning awaiting on your pleasure.”

“S’okay, I’ll eat ‘em cold,” he slurred.

His mother, it seemed, was not about to give up without a fight. 

“You will do no such thing! I’ve chores for you to do today, and if I don’t see you at your chair in five minutes, with a fork in your hand and a smile on your face, I will slide this Howler under your door instead!”

Charlie covered his face with a pillow, listening to the muffled footsteps stomp downstairs, debating whether or not she actually had a howler or if she was just bluffing. He growled and slid out from under the sheets, unwilling to risk having to face a Howler with his head ringing as it was.

He picked up a sweater and pulled it on without bothering to smell it first. His clothes were all wrinkled and stinking and he didn’t give a damn. If his mother woke him up early after he had to work all night, well then it wasn’t his problem if he was less than presentable at the breakfast table.

“Tea is on the stove if you want it,” his mother said as he padded in and slumped in a chair. She was mustering her sweetest voice, the one she reserved for asking favors or disguising criticism.

Charlie grunted and poured some tea into a chipped Oxford University mug, a piece his father had proudly filched from the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office after Arthur himself declared it safe and benign.

“You mentioned chores,” he mumbled around a mouthful of eggs.

Hiis mother scowled, clearly displeased. He knew it took every fiber of her being not to say something about chewing with his mouth open.

“George would like your help at the shop,” she said.

Charlie snorted. “That’s what Ron’s for.”

“George said he specifically wanted you.”

“Great. That’s promising. Does he want to name a new scent of Dungbombs after me? Besides, I have a job now, thank you so much for asking me about it.”

“I didn’t think you’d be allowed to talk about it,” Molly said in a hushed voice.

Charlie scowled in confusion, then he had to stifle a laugh as realization dawned on him.

“No mum, I’m not at that Department of Mysteries. I’m working at the bar, in Knockturn Alley.”

Her nose crinkled in disapproval. “Oh. Well, that’s nice. Anyway, George said he wanted your help with something, and I think he would really like it if his big brother saw his shop. It’s been so long since you’ve seen it.”

“Fine, I’ll go see George. We still good on Floo?”

“Pick up some more while you’re out, won’t you dear? Thank you.”

Charlie nodded and swallowed the last dregs of his tea. He’d gotten used to coffee in Romania, and it did a better job than tea at taking the edge off the morning headache, but tea would have to do for now.

“Oh, by the way,” he said, halfway out of his seat. “Do we have any weird old wands sitting in the attic?”

Molly scowled and planted her hands on her hips. “Why would we keep spare wands lying around? Do you think we would have let Ronald use a broken wand for an entire year if we happened to have extras in the attic?”

“I thought that was to teach him a lesson. Oh well. See you later,” Charlie said, and stuffed his feet into his boots and pushed the laces beneath the tongue without tying them.

He stepped into the den and tossed the last pinch of Floo into the fireplace, and was engulfed by green flames.

 

There were a number of reasons why he hadn’t visited George’s shop since returning to England. The main reason, the one he was least likely to admit, was that he simply didn’t want to see George’s shop. He didn’t actually like George’s shop. The one time he had visited triggered a deep suffocating claustrophobia with its narrow aisles, overstuffed shelves, bright colors, and constant, unapologetic racket from this dummy wand or that exploding watchamacallit. It was just too much, especially for someone fighting with a hangover.

Charlie barely managed to land on his feet when the Floo network spat him out in the comically narrow fireplace wedged next to the checkout counter. 

“Oi! Charlie!” Ron waved with a grin, looking over the heads of a gaggle of enthralled Hogwarts students clustered around a small box in his hand. “I’m doing a demo right now, but George is in the back!” Ron turned to the group of students and handed a green candy to a nervous looking volunteer.

Charlie nodded and ducked underneath the velvet rope blocking the counter, opened the curtain to the back room, and cringed as he heard the volunteer vomiting amidst eager applause.

“Doesn’t it taste like you’ve just eaten a green apple?” Ron asked.

“Upgrading the puking pastilles, eh?” Charlie asked. George looked up from a pile of diagrams strewn across a long metal table where he kept his books and conducted his smaller experiments, all dimly lit by a small rusted lantern dangling from a chain.

“It’s our newest line,” George said proudly, taking off a pair of reading glasses and setting them on the table. “You see, the problem was that some students would rather stay in class than puke, which is something that weighed heavily on my soul. So I’m testing additives to make the puking experience more pleasant, in this case, we’re trying a flavored aftertaste of your choice. Soon bile will be a thing of the past! You haven’t been using the old ones, have you? You smell a bit like puke yourself,” George said, bending and sniffing Charlie’s shoulder.

“I’ve taken a job as a bouncer at the Department of Mysteries,” Charlie said defensively. “All I smell now is puke.”

“And you’ve not felt the need to clean yourself?”

“If I wanted feedback on my hygiene, I’d have stayed at home with mum,” Charlie snapped, half tempted to risk splinching just to be somewhere else. 

“Which reminds me, I hear you’ve been a jerk to mum since you got back,” George said, crossing his arms. If he’d still been wearing the readers, he’d have looked just like Percy, except with one less ear.

“Well maybe if she wasn’t so damn intrusive and overbearing, then I wouldn’t have to be such a jerk to get her to leave me alone! It’s not like you didn’t give mum a hard time for years and years yourself.”

George rolled his eyes. “That was different. It was charming when I gave her a hard time. And you used to put me in a headlock every time. You should know, Charlie, nobody goes to the Burrow to be left alone. If people want to be left alone, they disappear to Romania for years on end!”

“Uh, could you two try to keep it down?” Ron asked sheepishly, his head poking through the curtain. “You might have just scared away a potential customer.”

“If one more person tells me to be quiet, keep it down, be nicer, or keep it to myself, so help me God!” Charlie spat, his hands shaking at his sides. Ron’s head disappeared.

“Listen, Charlie,” George said, rubbing his eyes wearily. “If something happened in Romania you don’t want to talk about, I get it. Believe me, I get not wanting to talk, and I get wanting people to leave you alone. But if you’re going to take it out on someone, take it out on me. Or Ron. If you want to put me in a headlock, if that would make you feel better, please just put me in a headlock. But don’t take it out on mum. She doesn’t deserve it.”  
Charlie said nothing, but slumped into a nearby wooden chair, suddenly embarrassed. 

“If mum is intrusive and overbearing,” George continued in a soft voice, “remember, she just lost a son. And I bet, in a way, she thought you coming home would fill a void. So when you treat her the way you’ve been treating her, it hurts her way more than it ever would coming from me.”

“What did you want help with?” Charlie said crossly. He got the point. He didn’t need to be lectured.

George’s face hardened and Charlie could tell he was shelving thoughts for later.

“A dragon illusion I’m revamping,” he said. I wanted to make sure I’ve got the wingbeat tempo right.

Charlie frowned. “Haven’t you done dragon illusions before?”

“Well, obviously. You may not recall the Weasley OWL incident of ‘95, but we have some rather infamous dragon illusions under our belt. But I said revamping. This is about professional pride. This isn’t Zonko’s. We do things right,” George said, and slid a diagram and quill across the table. 

Charlie pursed his lips as he deciphered the code of arcs and dashes George used to demarcate glides and wingbeats below a crude sketch of a Welsh Green.

“What you’ve drawn is fairly close to a Romanian Longhorn,” he said, picking up the quill and drawing an alternate sequence of arcs and dashes. “But if you want a Welsh Green, this would be more accurate.”

George nodded appreciatively as he took back the drawing. 

“Is there anything else you wanted? Or did you just want to talk about dragons?”

“Well, I’d also planned on lecturing you about your behavior, so I guess I got two things checked off my list today. You going to Ginny’s game Saturday?”

“If I don’t have to work,” Charlie mumbled. He didn’t have to work, odd as that may seem for a seedy bar on a weekend. Maybe they were quiet on Quidditch nights.

Charlie turned and threw aside the curtain and stalked out of the back without another word. He gave Ron a curt nod as he left. 

He opened the door to Diagon Alley and stormed past a group of frightened Hogwarts students looking to line their pockets with Weasley products. There was something he was supposed to pick up in Diagon, but he couldn’t remember what. Maybe if he wandered aimlessly long enough it would come to him. 

The bright sunlight made the cold feel even colder in Diagon Alley, and Charlie suddenly wished he’d remembered to grab a scarf on the way out. He’d remember next time. He decided to find somewhere to go for a while, to kill the next six or seven hours until he had to go to work. Maybe he could get a free round or two before he started.

Or maybe, he thought with a grin, pulling his coat tighter around his neck and stepping into the wind with a new resolve, just maybe the Leaky Cauldron would have interesting clientele again today.

 

Charlie snapped awake with a gasp, struggling for air like he had that time Fred thought it would be funny to sit on his chest. He felt the almost comforting throb in his temple, but distantly now, that familiar ache overwhelmed by the sharp stabbing in his side. He groaned and grasped for a pillow to cover his eyes, but came up empty handed.

He wasn’t at home, he realized with alarm, looking around at the rows of cots draped in white sheets, some of them occupied by snoring masses. This must be St. Mungo’s. He’d never been before, but it resembled the hospital ward in Romania he visited to treat his regular burns. He grimly noted the bandages wrapped around his stomach, and decided not to poke or prod. There was a more pressing matter than whatever might be missing, cut, damaged, or otherwise wrong with his torso.

That more pressing matter was his mother, sleeping in a chair next to him with her head propped against the hard tile wall, a loose ball of yarn and knitting needles lying mutely in her lap. Charlie glanced at the door, wondering if he’d be able to sneak out without waking her. Probably not, he decided.

Before he could devise an escape plan, a gray haired witch in a blue healer’s uniform appeared at the foot of his cot with a stern look.

“Ah, good, Mr. Weasley, you’re awake,” she said. Charlie winced as his mother woke next to him. “Well, you may or may not recall, but you splinched yourself last night. Looks like you left a rib behind somewhere.”

Charlie sighed, cursing under his breath. He’d never been able to live down failing his Apparating test all those years ago, and he was sure this would be twice as bad. Bill and George would never let him forget this one.

“So, what now?” he asked.

She narrowed her eyes. “Now we need to watch you while that dose of skelegro does its work. A rib is not an easy regrowth. We have to check it regularly to make sure it doesn’t skew and puncture your internal organs.”

Charlie smiled. “Great,” he said.

“Well, that will teach you to apparate with a bottle in your hand. I’ll be back to check on you again shortly. Do alert myself or another healer if you begin to feel shooting, excruciating pain or you are unable to breathe.”

Charlie pursed his lips and watched her go, hoping he would feel the shooting, excruciating pain before he would have to face his mother. It wasn’t coming.

“Oh Charlie!” she burst out, tears brimming in the corners of her puffy eyes, “What’s gotten into you? I scarcely recognize you anymore!”

Charlie draped his arm over his face, burying his eyes in the crook of his elbow. It pulled uncomfortably at his side with the regrowing rib, but the pain was better than having to look his mother in the eye.

“I’m fine, Mum. I’ve just been having a hard time is all. I thought I would be fine with a break from work, but I guess I don’t know what to do with myself.” He’d come up with more credible lies in his day, but this would have to do.

“If you were having a hard time in Romania you ought to have come home more! So much has happened without you! You’ve barely seen your niece, you’ve barely been to George’s shop, we wanted you to be a part of all this!”

Charlie huffed and rolled his eyes under his arm. He wondered if it would be worth the risk of a second splinch to get away from this conversation.

“Mum, you never liked Fleur, and you sure as hell don’t like George’s shop any more than I do, so don’t hold that against me. And besides, the Floo network fires both ways. No one bothered trying to visit me. No one put more than a token effort into trying to bring me around. Everyone was content with the idea of me. I could never measure up to the idea of me.”

“Charlie, that’s not fair,” Molly protested, and Charlie rolled over with a groan to face away from her.

“Mum, I think I’ll go back to sleep. Skelegro is starting to hit me,” he lied.

Molly sighed wearily and began sniffing in her seat. Her knitting needles started tapping at a furious pace. He gritted his teeth, wishing he could do or say something to make her go away. 

Maybe coming back from Romania had been a bad call. He could have been left happily alone, drinking bottle after bottle and minding his own business. Rolf probably would have let him remain in residence in an unofficial capacity, considering how long he’d worked for the sanctuary.

Or maybe he could have gone on a cross country broom trek. He’d heard of wizards doing that before, tracing the backbone of mountain ranges by broom. That’s the sort a thing a man did when he was happy to be newly single. It seemed like the sort of adventure one would have to postpone indefinitely for the sake of a relationship. Yes, a cross country trip is actually what he should have done. Theo might come asking around, trying to find him, and he would find that Charlie was off on some grand adventure. Then Theo would wonder if he’d been holding Charlie back for years, and now Charlie was finally doing everything he’d always wanted to do. Theo would get jealous and insecure, and hopefully gain weight and be struck by a rare strain of pox which normally only affected grindylows, leaving him horribly disfigured by oozing boils, stuck in a miserable marriage to a woman who would rather crucio herself than have sex with such a hideous monster. All while Charlie was flying the Alps by broom, his name dominating the Prophet after discovering a new breed of dragon which nested only in the highest mountains on the coldest peaks.

It was a brilliant plan. Better yet, it wasn’t too late to undo the terrible mistake of going home to the Burrow. He vowed the moment he was discharged to fill up a saddlebag of gear and take off on his broom. 

“I’m going on a cross country broom trip!” he announced, more loudly than he had intended.

His mother gave him a confused look then glanced past him as a set of clomping footsteps came to a halt.

“Oh, he’s full of stupid ideas? He can’t be hurt that badly, if his poor judgment is still intact.”

Charlie flung an arm over his face and groaned. “Bill, I’m in no mood for your lectures. Can’t you see I’m laid up with a serious injury?”

Bill shook his head and pulled a stool next to the bed with a screech.

“Right. Serious injury. I know a serious injury when I see one.”

“Oh please, you get the tar beat out of you by a raving loon with long fingernails and suddenly you’re an expert on injuries? I work with dragons, for Christ’s sake, dragons! With real teeth and scales and fire.”

“Worked,” Bill said quietly, his arms folded over his chest.

“What was that?” Charlie said. He felt his hands shaking down at his sides, and wanted nothing more than to break Bill’s nose in the other direction.

Bill cleared his throat. “I said ‘worked.’ Past tense. You said ‘work,’ present tense. I wanted to check to make sure you hadn’t begun believing the lie.”

“Boys!” Molly snapped, stamping her foot. A healer hushed her disapprovingly from the other side of the ward. “Boys, that’s enough. This is no place to be arguing.”

“Well it doesn’t matter. I’m going on a cross country broom trip. I’m sorry to have disrupted everyone’s picture perfect lives with my wretched existence. I’ll be gone by morning.”

Molly’s eyes shone brightly and her lip quivered. Her jaw worked wordlessly.

“Ginny’s game is tomorrow,” Bill said matter-of-factly. “And I doubt you put in your two weeks notice at the Department of Mysteries.”

Charlie snorted. He winced as a flash of hot pain needled through his side and he pulled the sheet back up to his chin. 

“I missed my shift tonight. Don’t think they’ll have me back.”

“Really, Charlie? You think anyone working in Knockturn is totally reliable? Honestly, if your attendance was too good they’d probably fire you under suspicion of being a Ministry spy, especially with your being a Weasley and all.”

Charlie frowned but didn’t say anything. He assumed he’d been fired, and the part of him that had been an upstanding employee for a decade did chafe at the thought of not doing his due diligence and failing to show up for work or put in a notice.

“So what are you really doing here, Bill? Don’t you have loans to collect, retirements to protect?”

“Actually, no. Believe it or not, I actually came to see if you were doing all right. We got word you were at St. Mungo’s but didn’t know what was wrong. Evidently you’ve been unwilling to admit apparating isn’t your thing.”

“You done?”

Bill smiled mirthlessly. “For now. Just be sure to behave yourself at Ginny’s game. Angelina’s coming, and for some reason she holds ol’ Captain Weasley in high regard.”

“Don’t forget Percy’s girlfriend, Audrey” Molly added. “We’ve managed not to scare her away, and for Percy’s sake we’d like to keep it that way.”

“If Percy hasn’t driven her away, I don’t see what the rest of us could do,” Charlie muttered. 

Bill grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good to see you’re still in there somewhere,” he said. He hugged Molly goodbye and then clomped out of the ward.

Angelina was going. Percy’s girlfriend, whoever she was, was going. That meant everyone would have a significant other there. Everyone except Charlie. Maybe he would get lucky and a stray Bludger would catch him in the face, or maybe he would have to do things the old fashioned way and just throw himself out of the stands. 

The thought of that horrible family tree sprang to mind, with its empty frame waiting next to Charlie’s face. He had no doubt his mother would not rest until that frame was full. 

Maybe when he left on his cross country broom trip, he would just have to burn down the Burrow.


	4. Chapter 4

“Is that the Mirror of Erised? I think I see my greatest desire before me…”

“Too obscure to work as a pickup line,” Artemis said, frowning in disapproval at the swaying wizard who was regaling an exasperated witch trying to hide behind a flagon. They didn’t have the heart to tell him that the real witch had created an illusion spell so that it appeared she was still in the same spot, trying to hide behind a flagon. The real witch had already left to go to the bathroom, ordered a meal at a different table, and gone home with a different stranger, at least two hours earlier. 

Charlie shrugged, a little sting running up his side. He hoped the healers were right and the rib was properly reformed. “I sure as hell don’t know what he’s talking about. Guessing it’s not very clever.”

“He explained it pretty well. It’s a mirror that shows you your greatest desire. Or so goes the story, anyway.”

“Ah,” Charlie said. He shifted uncomfortably, dreading the horror which was coming. He’d rather face a dragon. At least it was dark enough she wouldn’t be able to tell he was blushing.

“Artemis… do you want to go to the Quidditch game with me tomorrow?” he asked, his mouth painfully dry. He pulled his scarf tighter around his neck.

Artemis arched an eyebrow, but didn’t stop scanning the crowd for signs of trouble.

“You’re not very funny when you’re sober.”

“I’m being serious. But I do have a bit of a buzz.”

“Even worse,” she said, giving him a sidelong glance and crossing her arms. “You’re not my type.”

Charlie snorted. “It’s not like that. Don’t worry, you’re not exactly my type either. It’s just that everyone in my family is going, and everyone beside me is bringing their long time girlfriend, boyfriend, spouse… you know.”

“No offense Charlie, but as awful as it will be for you to go alone, I can guarantee it’ll be worse in the long run if I come with you. You’re better off not getting people’s hopes up. And I certainly have no interest in pretending to be your girlfriend for a night. Not my idea of a party.”

“Worth a shot,” Charlie muttered. Maybe it was for the best. He had fewer lies to juggle this way.

“Besides,” Artemis added, grinning. “I don’t think it would be a good idea to bring someone not in the  _ Sacred Nineteen _ , and a squib to boot.”

“You’re probably right. What do you know about that stupid book, anyway? I was out of the country when it was published.”

“Why the hell you asking me? At the Department of Mysteries, we’re paid to keep our ears closed and our mouths shut,” she said. “And I know this may come as a shock to you, but there’s not exactly a ton of squib producing families in that book. None of my concern.”

Charlie nodded. He decided he would just have to get his hands on a copy himself and see what all the fuss was about.

“Last call!” Jarvis shouted from behind the bar. “Pay up and move out!”

The cloaked patrons dropped coins on the tables and filtered out. Charlie watched them go, shivering every time the heavy door opened with a blast of winter air. 

“Need anything else from me?” Charlie asked as the last patron slammed the door. He knew she and Jarvis would say no, but he always hoped they would give him an excuse not to go home. They shook their head and Jarvis poured him his complimentary shot. 

“Good luck tomorrow,” Artemis said as he drained the shot glass. Charlie nodded back and she scooped up her coat and walked out. 

“Thanks,” he said after she left. He grabbed his own coat from the peg on the wall and pulled it over his shoulder. He’d opted to wear his skroot plate coat rather than the worn blue hand-me-down he scrounged from a dusty closet in the Burrow. His skroot coat was damned heavy, but it didn’t have any holes, and he figured if it could keep him warm flying on a broom at altitude, it would do just fine on the streets of London at night. 

It was warm enough, but flying cloaks just weren’t designed to be worn while walking. Fire resistant skroot plates smacked against his knees and the cloak reeked of smoke, but it had saved him from burns, kept him warm, but most importantly, it made him feel a bit more like himself; clunky, unwieldy, badly patched, but functional.

He turned down an alley and debated whether or not he felt like wandering the streets aimlessly until his bones rattled with cold again, or if he felt like getting a drink at the Leaky Cauldron. Their drinks were overpriced, but it was something. He turned to head to the Leaky Cauldron.

Blast ended skroots were remarkable, if unappreciated creatures. They were ugly, demanding, grew far too quickly, etc, but their chitinous hides were remarkably effective at warding off fire, not to mention more mundane bumps and bruises.

But they didn’t do shit against curses.

He dodged the first red blast by ducking to the side, but the second caught him full in the stomach and thrashed him into a brick wall. Pain exploded from his shoulder with a wet tearing sound, and his face cracked loudly against the cobblestones, blood spurting from his nose as he fell in a heap.

He heard two distinct sets of footsteps crunch toward him, but the petrificus curse made it impossible to turn and face them. 

“We know why you’re back in England, Weasley,” a man with a nasal voice said.

Charlie wanted to laugh. He sure as hell didn’t know why he was in England, but apparently some stranger in a dark alley knew. Maybe someone took Divination seriously after all. 

“And we know what kind of man you are, what kind of … proclivities, you hide,” a woman said. She spat loudly and a ball of warm phlegm landed on his neck.

“This little game you’re playing, well, let’s just say we’re not very playful in our family,” the man said, cracking his knuckles menacingly.

Charlie wondered how many times they’d practiced this speech. It might have worked on someone who had something more to lose. 

“So just know, if you cause problems, if you stick around too long, well, our next visit won’t be so friendly.” 

Both forced a chuckle, and with a shuffling and a scraping of boot on rock, they left him in the pool of blood leaking out of his nose. As their footsteps faded into the night, Charlie could faintly hear them congratulating each other.

It occurred to Charlie that he would likely be petrified in the alley for another few hours until the curse wore off. His eyes dried and ran with tears, and his neck began to ache. He had been petrified before, of course; it was something his sixth year Defense professor had forced them all to endure. What was his name again? Charlie couldn’t remember. 

A few minutes of not being able to scratch your nose or blink, however, was entirely different than hours of the same treatment.

Time passed slowly for Charlie. Some street punk rifled through his pockets, humming a Weird Sisters tune and plucking out sickles and knuts and god knows whatever else Charlie had on his person. He wondered why anyone bothered with the Cruciatus curse. All you need to do, Charlie now knew, was petrify him and leave him for people to pick over his body and go through his pockets like a vulture, leaving him fully conscious but completely incapable of resisting.

After the blood finally crusted on his face and there was enough light to see the rubble in front of his face, his muscles all went slack, like flour out of a punctured sack. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, feeling a wash of relief despite the agony in his twisted neck and the numbness lingering in the arm pinned underneath him.

Slowly and gingerly he pushed himself to a sitting position and carefully turned his head this way and that. It was still early morning and the alley still appeared in shades of blue and gray, but the sun had crested just enough to break the curse’s hold. 

After shakily rising to his feet he checked his pockets to see what all was missing. The skroot coat had many, and even he forgot half of what he was carrying at any given time. His handful of silver sickles were gone, of course, but that didn’t bother him too much. He expected as much. His buck knife was still in place, but that wasn’t a surprise either. Most wizards didn’t see any value in a knife unless it looked dark and sinister. 

Charlie groaned, his legs shuddering beneath him. His legs twitched and he held onto the cold brick wall to steady himself. He knew apparating was probably not a good idea, especially after his recent mishap, but he didn’t feel strong enough to walk to a floo access. He would have to apparate and hope for the best.

His fingers felt for the buttoned wand sheath sewn into the left armpit, and his heart sank as he felt the open straps. He dug a finger into the sheath and gasped. The wand, his wand, the wand he’d gotten from Ollivander’s after Bill had lorded his own wand over his head for two years, the wand that could throw up a shield spell faster than he could blink, was gone.

Charlie nearly collapsed onto the ground again as he swayed and threw up. The bastard had taken his wand, probably already pawned it somewhere. Second-hand wands weren’t worth much, but it would no doubt fetch at least a couple of galleons, enough to stay drunk for a couple nights.

He staggered down the alley onto Knockturn proper, stumbling into carts and doorframes. He had to go somewhere, it didn’t matter where, but he had to get out of there, get some food in his stomach and maybe a vodka to dull the ache in his side, his stomach, and his newly broken nose. 

Finally Charlie stumbled onto Diagon Alley. The light of dawn was blinding compared to the persistent gloom of Knockturn, and this morning especially so. Diagon Alley was full of morning businesses, especially on the weekends, and even this early on a Friday morning the street was beginning to bustle. Not that the growing crowds affected Charlie, his face covered in blood and coat covered in vomit. Everyone gave him a wide berth. 

He stormed into George’s shop and Ron’s face cycled between excitement and concern as Charlie stumbled to the fireplace and tossed in a fistfull of floo powder.

 

Charlie had never fit in the small wooden shower stall at the Burrow. He’d gotten splinters in his shoulders more than once, and he’d had a near permanent bruise on his right shin from crashing into the small plank jutting out of the wall which served double time as a stool and a shelf. Every day for years he’d cursed that plank’s existence.

Today he fell asleep on the plank. Exhaustion and a profound sense of loss over his stolen wand first made it impossible to stand up straight in the shower, then he finally collapsed onto that detestable plank. At last, the crusted blood chipped away and ran down the drain, the stink of vomit evaporated into steam, and Charlie fell asleep.

It had been a long time since he’d gone to sleep sober, longer still since he’d not dreamed of Theo. He woke with a start, his skin pink and his fingertips wrinkled, and realized wistfully he dreamed of nothing at all.

Someone pounded on the bathroom door. Fred, maybe George? Bill? Definitely Bill. Bill hated it when someone else got more time to preen than he did.

“Charlie?”

It was Molly. He shook his head to clear the fog. This wasn’t a summer between years at Hogwarts, Fred was dead, George had his own place in Diagon Alley, and Bill didn’t bother with grooming as much now that his face was so scarred.

“Charlie, would you like some lunch before we go to Ginny’s Quidditch match? Ron and Hermione are here, and we’re expecting George and Angelina any minute now.”

“Be right there,” he yelled, and turned off the tap with a sigh. He’d forgotten, lying frozen and bleeding in the alley, that the weekend was going to be a couple’s retreat. Too bad the hex had worn off. Paralysis sounded better. For once he wanted to wake up where he wanted, when he wanted, hell, with who he wanted.

Didn’t matter. It was time to be the thirteenth wheel in the family block party. He dragged a towel off a hook, still damp from the steam, and dried himself off as best he could without magic. 

He couldn’t get completely dry, not with the small towels his parents used. Normally he’d finish the job with his wand. He had to get his wand back. Hadn’t he lost enough? His job, his home, Theo? And now his wand. All he had left were his blood and vomit stained sweaters and his skroot plate coat.

It was probably time for a clean sweater, if nothing else, he decided as he padded into his room and rifled through his drawers. Charlie curled his lip in irritation as he realized that all his sweaters were stained. He hadn’t bothered to clean any of them. He sure as hell couldn’t do it now, with or without magic. Charlie weighed his options. The clothes on the floor and in the cabinet stank of vomit and whiskey. The one in his hands only stank of vomit and blood.

He shrugged and pulled it on. Vomit and blood it was. He’d tell everyone it was a popular scent among dragon handlers. Who could contradict him? It’s not like any of them were dragon handlers.

He felt a twinge of pain in his side where the thugs had kicked, him, thankfully not on the side where he’d splinched himself. They hadn’t hit him too hard. Most wizards didn’t know what was a hard hit and what wasn’t, but one strike had caught him good and square in the floating ribs. Even idiots got lucky sometimes.

Once he scraped all the grime out of his sweater that he could, Charlie opened the door and walked downstairs, past the loathsome family tree, around the turn and into the kitchen.

Ron and Hermione sat at the table speaking quietly while Molly rummaged through a cupboard, pulling out baskets and satchels in a fury. Charlie didn’t like the look Ron gave him.

“Morning,” Charlie said gruffly, picking up the coffee pot on the stove. It was empty.

“It’s one in the afternoon,” Ron said.

“Ron, if a man ever says ‘morning,’ when it’s afternoon, just assume he’s had a long night and let him have some caffeine before you start correcting him.”

Silence reigned while Charlie set the coffee pot to boil on the stove. He stood with his back to Ron and Hermione with his arms crossed, glaring at the coffee pot for daring to take so long to boil, while his head pounded something terrible.

It turned out to be true that a watched pot took longer to boil. Ron and Hermione started whispering behind him. He ignored them and poured himself a mug, inhaled deeply, and took a sip. It was burned, bitter and gritty, but he felt more like himself. 

Feeling prepared to take on the couples’ retreat, he turned back around.

“Charlie,” Hermione said by way of greeting, as her eyes flicked from the bruises to the scrapes to the crusty stain on his shirt.

“Hermione,” he answered, lifting his chin defiantly. He was not about to be judged by his kid brother’s girlfriend. Then it occurred to him that if he stuck around to eat with the whole family, he would be put on display in the kitchen, a single man, if you can believe it, in this day and age, while all his other brothers paraded by with their girlfriends and children and families, and Charlie didn’t need that in his life. 

“Enjoy breakfast,” he said, and turned and walked out of the kitchen and back up the stairs, as quickly as he could without sloshing and his coffee. He lowered his blinds until just a crack of light snuck in above the windowsill and dragged his stool over to the window. It was hard and wobbly, but it was just the right height for him to watch the others arrive and judge them before they could judge him.

He heard a rush of flame from the fireplace downstairs, followed by Molly’s elated shouts. Bill, maybe? He couldn’t make out the voices through the floorboards to know for sure. Ron’s old room had a vent which connected to the dining room which was perfect for eavesdropping, but then he would have to go into Ron’s room. He didn’t want them to hear him moving around upstairs. Bill would know what he was up to. 

There was a loud crack, followed by more voices and laughter. Charlie grimaced and took another sip of coffee. Was it possible to intentionally splinch oneself? That would be a handy trick for getting out of the couple’s retreat. If he had his wand he could at least blow something up and maim himself. Better yet, he could try that spell he’d heard about to make something ferment and have a cup of tipsy coffee to really take the edge off. He glanced at Bill’s side of the room, wondering how good the odds were that Bill stashed liquor in the mattress.

Charlie shook his head. Not likely.

He pressed the hot mug against his temple to dull the throbbing and caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He ducked into the corner of the window and watched Angelina and George swoop down on shiny brooms, George struggling with an unwieldy package under his arm. They disappeared from view as they stepped up to the front door. 

He had always liked Angelina, liked her enough to think she could do better than George. He was an idiot. Granted, a clever, innovative, and resourceful idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. Angelina, on the other hand, was smart, strong, and didn’t put up with bullshit. 

He glanced back at his bedroom door, decorated with a torn Cannons poster. Everyone had probably arrived now. He should probably go downstairs. Or, he could sneak into his dad’s closet and find a broom and leave with nothing but a broom and a coat, ready to live off the land on his cross country broom trip. 

Then again, he didn’t have a wand. That would complicate living off the land.

Someone knocked quietly.

“Charlie? Charlie dear, we’re getting ready to go now, if you’d like to come downstairs.”

Charlie swore under his breath. He hadn’t heard Molly come upstairs. 

“Coming,” he growled. He sure as hell wouldn’t like to go downstairs.

He opened the door and felt a grim sense of satisfaction as Molly’s face fell as her eyes flicked down to the stains on his shirt.

“Oh Charlie, honey, let me clean that for you,” she said, drawing her wand.

He held up his hand to stop her. “It’s fine, mum, really it’s fine,” he said, sliding past her and clambering numbly down the stairs, and past the horrible family tree.

All conversation came to a halt as Charlie entered the kitchen, doing his very best not to make eye contact. It was damn hard with so many Weasley’s crammed into the kitchen. Bill with Fleur and Victoire, Percy with his girlfriend, George with Angelina, Ron with Hermione, and Arthur sitting contently at the table with an open newspaper. Charlie felt Molly’s hand on his shoulder and he felt a surge of panic. Without a wand, there was no escape. The couple’s retreat had begun, with its token single in tow.

“And now that Charlie is back from Romania, Ron has some competition for the smelliest Wesley,” George announced, dropping the package on the table.

“George, let’s not start with that,” Arthur said, shooting a nervous glance at Charlie.

“Mum said we were leaving,” Charlie said.

“Ah yes, we were, I’ve got a portkey here,” George said, ripping the package down the middle to reveal a steering wheel.

“How’d you get your hands on a portkey?” Percy asked. He leaned forward with a scowl.

“Floo tech owed me a favor. First he said he’d be by to hook up the shop on a Monday between ten and three, but didn’t show up until Thursday at five.”

Hermione crossed her arms. “The same thing happened to me, but when I complained they told me to just deal with it.”

“Well, what I didn’t tell you just now, is that when they finally did get me hooked up, the only place I could floo into was the Ministry of Magic’s office of records,” George added with a wink. “He traded me a favor for my silence.”

“That is a huge security breach!” Percy snapped. “Don’t tell me you looked at anything. What did you look at, and do I need to have you obliviated?”

George rolled his eyes. “Ooh, someone was Warden of Azkaban for an afternoon and suddenly he’s a big shot? Relax, Perce, I only found one letter I could use for blackmail, and it turns out that both the sender and the recipient died in the sixties. Now if they had grandkids, I might still have options.”

“I was warden for three days, I’ll have you know. And I am kind of a big shot.”

“Boys, please!”

“Sorry, Mum,” Percy and George said in unison.

Molly glared, then she gave a brief nod at their repentant faces.

“Alright everyone, gather round and grab on!”


	5. Chapter 5

It had been years since Charlie had been to a Quidditch game, not since the disastrous World Cup. He and some of the other handlers had gotten leave to go see the game. Not that his family knew. God no. He’d sat with the Bulgarians. He was probably the only redhead on the Bulgarian side of the stadium.

Quidditch games were a rush, from start to finish. The stands thrummed with anticipation. It was a rare opportunity to be just another face in a crowd, such a rare feeling for witches and wizards who lived a life hiding from the world. As overwhelming as it was to be packed shoulder to shoulder, it was a refreshing novelty. It would make it easy to forget Theo for an hour.

Charlie had half a mind to disappear into the crowd and find a spot in the standing section next to a beer cart, but his worthless brother Bill was watching him like a hawk and George was pressed up against his back. There would be no escape for him.

“Who’s she playing?” Bill shouted as they threaded their way up the stands. Molly led the way to their row and they sidestepped their way to their assigned seats.

“Well grandpa, the banners on the other side have a falcon, so I’m going to guess the Falcons.” George said. “Oh, look at me, I just deciphered a hieroglyph! You’re lucky that I’m not interested in being a peon, or Gringott’s would have scooped me up and left you in the gutter.”

Bill rolled his eyes as he took his seat on the bleacher. “Oh please, George. You don’t have a good enough sense of style to be a curse breaker. Goblins don’t respect a man in a sweater.”

“But they respect one with a dragon tooth earring?” Charlie snorted. “Seems a little backwards to me, and I’m a handler.”

“Are you?” Bill asked, arching a haughty eyebrow.

“Boys, please.” Molly stomped her foot. “Can we not bicker in front of company?”

“Mum I don’t think Angelina and Audrey count as company,” George said, but he, Bill, and Charlie fell silent all the same.

A group of shirtless men in green and gold body paint filed into the bleacher bench in front of them, the tallest taking a spot in front of Charlie. Charlie could scarcely see the pitch green over his head. He felt his eye start to twitch.

“I’m going for some quaffle corn,” George said, checking his watch. “Anyone else want anything? Harpy hash? Dungbomb?”

“Nobody wants a dungbomb, George,” Percy said.

George frowned. “Where’s Ron when you need him? If he was going to hop a ride on my portkey, he should at least sit with us, box seats or no. Ginny should have given those to her favorite brother.”

Charlie sighed. The game wasn’t due to start for another fifteen minutes, and his butt already hurt from the sharp bleacher seat. He closed his eyes while Angelina explained the rules of the game to Percy’s muggle girlfriend Audrey.

“Charlie could have played professionally,” Molly told Audrey with a knowing smile.

“Are you kidding?” Charlie interrupted, leaning back so he could talk around Bill. “The years I played weren’t exactly bursting at the seams with talent. We had multiple games where no one scored a goal, and that’s not because someone had a great keeper; we just couldn’t find anyone who could throw.”

Molly reached past Bill and patted his shoulder. “You really are too modest, dear. I stand by what I said.”

Charlie snorted. “Yeah what an honor it would be to have a professional Quidditch player in the family.”

Suddenly the green and gold morons in front of them pounded their chests and hoisted the middle one into the air and changed something about hot Harpy bodies. They dropped back into their seats and elbowed each other, congratulating each other. Molly frowned disapprovingly and Charlie felt like a blood vessel in his temple was about to burst. His head hurt too much to have to sit within arms length of fans who were practicing their cheers before the game even began.

George reappeared at the end of the row, balancing a bucket of steaming quaffle corn, and clambered over one Weasley after another to get back to his spot. As he stepped over Charlie he raised the bucket out of reach.

“None for you, fatty,” George said.

Charlie stretched as far as he could and tapped Angelina on the shoulder.

“How are the Falcons looking this year? Hard to follow Quidditch out on the reserves.”

“Decent,” Angelina said with a shrug. “They’re a solid middle of the pack this year. Their defense is still good but they’ve not been able to replace their second or third Chaser with anyone worth a damn, so they can’t score to save their life.”

“Didn’t the Falcons change hands this year?” George asked around a mouthful of quaffle corn.

“No, that was the Harriers. The Nott’s still own the Falcons, same as ever,” Angelina said.

“Oh okay. That makes sense. I saw Theodore Nott escorting an old goblin up to the box. Bet that was Cantankerous.”

“Didn’t he write the _Sacred Nineteen_?” Arthur asked.

“No dear, that was the _Twenty Eight_. Wrote that before we were even born. He’s far too old for writing books,” Molly said.

“Wait, you saw Theo? How did he look? Was he with anyone?” Charlie demanded.

“I think he just said he was with Cantankerous,” Bill offered, his characteristically smug smirk in full form.

“Well there was a girl who looked like she could have been a Greengrass, but it’s been years since I’ve seen either of them. For some reason I don’t get a lot of the old families in my shop,” George said.

“They’re getting married, aren’t they?” Molly asked.

“All the old families are having weddings since that book came out,” Bill said, craning his neck as referees started swooping onto the pitch. “Last gasp of a dying breed. Right, Mum? Everyone all worried about blood again?”

“Oh Bill, you know that’s not it.”

“Yeah? So that wasn’t you paging through the _Sacred Nineteen_ last night, making a list of eligible bachelorettes for Charlie?”

“Bill!” Molly pointedly looked away from Charlie.

“Too bad you killed Bellatrix Lestrange, she’d have been a keeper.”

“Bill! That is not a joking matter!”

“That’s true, Bill. Beallatrix was married. We don’t want people to think we don’t value the sanctity of marriage.”

“George, that’s enough!”

“Has anyone else noticed that the game has started!” Charlie shouted over the arguing and the rising cheers, his nails digging into his palms.

“Which one’s Ginny?”

“Maybe the one with Weasley printed on her jersey?”

“I need to go to the bathroom. Just, don’t mind me. Sorry, didn’t mean to step on your foot.”

“Did someone just score? What’s happening? I can’t see around these… shirtless men.”

“Do they serve anything not fried in lard and battered in fat?”

“Ack! That doesn’t look safe!”

“True, Mum, she could quite possibly fall to a terrible death at any moment and that would be the end of the Weasley daughters.”

“George!”

Suddenly feeling nauseous, Charlie muttered something and clambered over Arthur to the aisle. An ear splitting horn blared and the shirtless Harpy fans leapt to their feet with a bellow, knocking Charlie into the stairs. He dimly heard someone asking if he was okay, and he shook his head and staggered down the bleacher steps, clinging to the railing to keep his balance. There were just too many people, too much shouting, and he was too sober.

At last his feet thudded onto earth instead of creaky wood, and he sank to his knees, feeling unbearably hot. He pulled his scarf loose and pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes. It had been a long time since he’d been around so many people. Another cheer echoed from the stadium above, dust sprinkling down from the bleacher scaffolding. He needed to find a drink before he went back into the throng, into the press of bodies.

They’d moved the concession stand since he’d last been to a game there, and he had to backtrack to find them. Twice more the referee horn blared, but he couldn’t see the scoreboard. He cared less than he thought he would.

There was only a short line at the concession stand. At his turn at the counter he was greeted by a stooped old woman wrapped in a dozen scarves of clashing colors.

“Any vodka?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Haven’t had anything stronger than butterbeer since the Cannons game in ‘93.”

Charlie’s heart sank. He’d get more of a buzz from spoiled milk.

She leaned forward. “Now you didn’t hear this from me, but sometimes I see folks passing around something a mite stronger at the decommissioned visitors’ locker room.”

Charlie nodded in appreciation, a new vigor powering his steps as he left the concession stand. He knew the locker room she was talking about. Amid accusations of sabotage the Harpies had been forced to build a new, state-of-the-art facility when a girder had fallen on an opposing team’s keeper at halftime.

He immediately felt at home when he found the cluster of disheveled men and women crowding in front of the locker room door, each waiting their turn to thrust a fistful of coins through a rent in the door in exchange for a small flask. It reminded him of his nightly scene in Knockturn Alley.

Charlie fell in line behind a pair of small wizards, comically oversized hoods pulled low over their faces.

“Got any firewhiskey?” The shorter one asked, holding a few galleons in front of the crack in the door. His companion slapped his hand down. The man’s voice sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it. Probably a patron at the Department of Mysteries.

“No, no, and no! I am not dealing with you on firewhiskey again!” she said, “you may not remember, but you were sick for a day!”

“Fine!” The man turned back to the door. “Quintin’s Black,” he said, forcing a gruff edge into his voice.

Then it clicked. Charlie knew why he recognized their voices. It had been a long night, petrified in the cold, bleeding in a dark corner, and all he’d known of his attackers were their voices and their threats. He grabbed for his wand in his pocket then remembered it was these very individuals who were responsible for it being stolen. He balled his fists and set his feet, eyeing the distance and judging if he could smash both of them in the back of the head before they or anyone else could react. He was sure it was possible, but surely someone would intervene. No doubt they would be granted the courtesy whereas he had been left to rot. His eye twitched. There was nothing he could do.

The man took his flask from the crack in the door and unscrewed the lid to give it a sniff, nodding appreciatively. “Let’s go,” he said.

Almost as one, the two turned on their heels and stopped just short of running into Charlie. He could barely make out the shapes of their faces as they looked up at him, at each other, then back up at  him again.

“Do I know you?” Charlie asked, furrowing his brow.

“I don’t think so,” the woman said hurriedly as she moved to step past him. Charlie stepped in front of her.

“Sorry, feel like I know you. What year did you graduate?”

“We didn’t.” The man said, leaning to look past Charlie. “Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve a game to bet on.”

“Quit reminiscing and get your bootleg or get out of line!” Someone barked from behind Charlie. The man and woman brushed roughly passed him on either side, and Charlie let them go.

“Vodka, and be quick about it,” Charlie said, dropping some money onto the shelf beneath the opening. A gloved hand snatched it up and disappeared, and reemerged a moment later with a small silver flask. Charlie took it and sloshed it, his heart sinking. It scarcely had more than a few good swallows.

He stepped out of line and stood on his tiptoes, scanning the crowd for his assailants. He spotted them just as they turned toward the Falmouth side of the stadium. Charlie dropped the flask into one of his deeper pockets and jogged to catch up, praying they wouldn’t simply disapparate.

For the first time in his life Charlie’s luck held and he spotted them picking their way up the stands. Evidently they believed they’d lost him, and they seemed more concerned with finding their row than checking for pursuers. Suddenly a referee’s horn blared directly over Charlie’s head, and the crowd rose to their feet and swept down the bleachers towards the concession stands and the restrooms.

Charlie flicked up the collar of his coat and pulled his cap down tight over his head to hide his hair. He knew his best chance of disappearing in the crowd was to cover his red hair.

He walked past the stairs that his assailants had taken to their seats and hoofed it up the next set of risers, watching them out of the corner of his eye. If he could get to a higher row and quietly sit a few posts behind them perhaps he could eavesdrop and learn something, hopefully a name. The information peddlers of Knockturn Alley could do wonders with a name.

Charlie was so focused on keeping his head down that he didn’t notice the three shirtless men splattered in Harpy paint guffawing and shrieking through the Falmouth stands until the first one tripped and tumbled into him, sending them all sprawling into the steps in a breathless tangle of limbs and cracking his head against an armrest.

Charlie snapped. It was a common enough expression, but Charlie had never truly understood it on a visceral level until this moment. He was tired of being shoved, hit, and trampled by everyone and their mother.

He ignored the looks of concern on one of the Harpy fan’s faces and took his outstretched arm, not only to pull himself to his feet, but to use as a counterweight as he launched his fist into the man’s face with every ounce of his considerable rage and frustration.

The Harpy fan fell. Hard. His friend whirled on Charlie, his lip curled in fury as he grabbed for his wand. Charlie grabbed him by the wrist before he could draw and punched him square in the green painted stomach. He wheezed and doubled over with a gasp, and Charlie shoved him away.

“Petrificus Totalis!”

Charlie felt his body go rigid for the second time that day, fist cocked at his shoulder, his knuckles split and bleeding. HIs shoulder, his hip, and his knee all screamed in pain as he fell into the risers. No one bothered trying to catch him, and everything went black.

 

 

 

Charlie rolled his eyes, though even that pained him. This was the third time the rookie constable stepped out of the dim interrogation room to ask her sergeant for advice. Charlie flexed his fingers to keep the blood flowing past the wiry bonds squeezing his wrists.

“He says he doesn’t have a wand.”

“Bullshit. They all say they don’t have a wand. Just because he passed it off before we picked him up doesn’t mean he’s off the hook.”

“We’re releasing him,” a new voice said.

“And?”

“And dropping charge from aggravated muggle assault to ordinary muggle assault.”

“On what grounds?”

“Favor to Arthur. They’ve been through enough.”

Charlie squeezed the bridge of his nose and sighed. He’d rather go to Azkaban than get bailed out because of his father’s connections.

“Okay.”

The door squeaked open again and the junior constable reentered. She gripped the back of her rickety chair and scowled.

“I heard,” Charlie said, interrupting whatever speech the constable was about to give. “My dad here or can I walk myself out?”

“Think he’s here. Can’t go too far without a wand, can you?”

Charlie stood and held out his bound hands.

The constable shook her head and opened the door. “Not until we get to the release area. You’ll get your things there as well.”

It was bad enough that his dad called in a favor to bail him out. Now Charlie had to face him with his hands tied.

The release area was a series of heavy iron gates, lit with far too many torch sconces and manned with too many constables. Not as many as when he came in the jail on the intake side, but still too many. He could feel their eyes on him as he walked past, whispering to each other. No doubt they recognized the red hair, had heard who had called in a favor. The Weasley’s enjoyed great notoriety in the wake of the war. Far too much notoriety to hope that no one would recognize him.

Another constable waited with his coat by the last gate. Charlie lifted his bound arms again.

The constable shook his head.

“Really? You give me my coat but I can’t actually put it on?”

“Sorry, Charlie.”

Charlie rocked his head back and took a deep breath.

“Please? Don’t make me face my father like this.”

The constable glanced at the gates in front and behind them. He drew his wand and tapped Charlie’s bonds. They snaked apart, wound up the constable’s arm, and finally onto a hook on his belt. Charlie rubbed his wrists in relief.

“Thank you,” he said and he slipped his coat on. His sleeves were long enough to hide the red marks on his wrists. The constable nodded and pushed the final gate open for him.

Charlie licked his lips nervously and stepped out into the waiting area. How does one walk out of jail? Does he hold his head high or does he try to appear nonchalant? Charlie didn’t know. He tried for something between proud and casual and probably failed altogether.

He shrank behind the high collar of his coat when he saw his father. Regardless of the circumstances. Arthur Weasley perpetually looked as though he was waiting for bad news. His clothes were crimped and wrinkled, his tie knot loose, and his blazer lapels turned out the wrong way. He slumped on a stool in the corner, his head drooping low with fatigue.

Arthur didn’t notice Charlie at first. Charlie pulled his coat closed to hide the vomit stain on his shirt, and cleared his throat.

Arthur’s head jerked up as if he had been on the edge of sleep. He stood slowly and placed his hands gently on Charlie’s shoulders, his lips quivering in an uncertain smile.

“Are you ready to go home?”

Charlie nodded, his head throbbing.

“We apparating?”

Arthur shook his head. “We’re going by Floo. There’s a wired chimney nearby.”

“Why Floo?”

“Gives us time to talk. Shall we?”

Charlie swallowed hard and dug his hand deep in the pocket where he’d remembered stashing the flask of vodka. His hand came out wet. The dealer must have been distributing conjured flasks. Normally Charlie would have had no problem polishing off his drink. Normally he didn’t get into fights until after he finished his drink.

Charlie followed his father out of the Magical Law Enforcement outpost. They stepped onto a cracked sidewalk dimly let by unevenly spaced lampposts. Their feet crunched in the built-up snow. Charlie couldn’t read the storefront signage, or anything else to indicate where they were. Come to think of it, he’d never even bothered to ask where the match was played, whether the Harpies were home or away.

“I only had two siblings, not six,” Arthur said, his voice catching in his throat. “Even so, I thought my father couldn’t, or wouldn’t see me.

“I can only imagine what it must be like to have been one of seven. I imagine it must be easy to feel like we couldn’t see you individually. And to be honest, I was very afraid, especially once the twins were born and all of the sudden there were five of you, that I would begin to lose track.

“But it never happened. You all became so incredibly different and unique. Even George and…” his voice faltered, “even George and Fred. Even they were different.”

Arthur touched Charlie’s shoulder and directed him down an even darker alley. It made Charlie nervous. He hadn’t had great luck in dark alleys lately.

“So believe me when I tell you this. I can see when you are trying to hide. I could see even when you left for Romania, that there was some reason other than dragons that made you want to leave. I can see that something brought you back, and I can see something is eating you alive.”

Arthur stopped them in front of a small brick building with a dilapidated sign and warning tape and pulled the door open. The interior was completely vacant beside the dust, splintered furniture, and a massive fireplace.

“I know you’re not ready to tell me what it is. You’re my son and whatever it is, I will always love you. Please don’t let it make you bitter.”

Charlie stared blankly at the fireplace. “Done?”

Arthur cast a fistful of Floo powder. “The Burrow.”


	6. Chapter 6

Charlie waited a good twenty minutes after he was sure Arthur went to bed. The door to his parents’ room made the window panes in his and Bill’s room rattle when it closed, so he always knew when they went to bed.

He only opened his door about eighteen inches to avoid the squeak in the hinges and squeezed into the hallway. He crept past Ron’s empty room, then held his breath as he tiptoed past Percy and George’s rooms. He froze at the top of the stairs as he heard muffled voices. Needless panic, he told himself. Probably just George and Angelina talking. 

Charlie padded downstairs, past the loathsome family tree. He quashed the urge to light it on fire and stepped into the kitchen. 

The Burrow’s kitchen had too many cabinets. Molly had always complained of not being able to find anything, but they needed to keep adding cabinets so they had space to keep enough food for a family of nine. At one point they had cabinets reaching into the living room, but Arthur removed them when Bill officially moved out and they didn’t need a fifth cupboard for canned beans.

Charlie had never really thought much about his mother’s frustration with her kitchen, but tonight he sympathized. He pillaged cabinet after cabinet, and tossed aside sacks and jars and cans. He had all night to clean up his mess, even if he had to do it without magic. 

There had to be something here. Beer or wine would do. He knew scotch or vodka would be too much to hope for. He would have to take what he could get. Anything to dull the inexorable ache behind his eye and forget what his father had said. 

Why couldn’t they just leave him alone? He popped the lid off a smoky glass bottle and sniffed it. Vinegar. He tossed it over his shoulder, only vaguely aware on some level that it shattered against a countertop. Charlie didn’t need anyone’s pity. Not his father’s, not his mother’s, and certainly not his baby brothers and sister. They had no right to pity him, if they had no idea what it was like to be used and tossed aside and be expected to accept that treatment as his lot in life. 

“Looking for something?”

Charlie froze.

“Hungry,” he mumbled, slowly setting down another unmarked bottle. 

“Normally I wouldn’t give a second thought to finding a Weasley armpit deep in a kitchen cupboard at this hour of the night, but I don’t think you’re looking for Percy’s Hot Pockets.”

Charlie pulled his head out of the cupboard and shut it.

“Hello, Hermione,” he said. 

Hermione stood with her arms crossed and a stern look on her face, flanked on one side by Angelina and on the other by a short Asian woman with glasses whom Charlie only vaguely recognized. 

“Evening,” Charlie said. “Looking for a snack. Hi Angelina. Hi, ah, miss?”

“I’m Audrey. I’m Percy’s girlfriend.”

“Which you might remember, if you weren’t so intent on getting sloshed!” Hermione snapped.

“Hermione, we talked about this,” Audrey said, a hand on Hermione’s arm. 

Hermione nodded, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. 

“Charlie, we’re worried about you,” she said.

“What?”

“Captain, I know your parents might not be the type to say it, but we can see when someone’s been drinking too much.”

“I, what?” Charlie said, looking back and forth between Angelina and Hermione. Why the fuck had he let his wand get stolen? He could have disapparated, or better yet, lit the kitchen on fire and bolted during the blaze. 

“Charlie, how long have your hands been shaking like that?” Audrey asked. 

Charlie shrugged, carefully not looking at his hands. “Hadn’t noticed.”

Audrey smiled grimly. “They’ve been shaking since we met earlier today.”

“Don’t see what that has to do with anything. Who the fuck are you to bother?”

“She’s a psychologist, Charlie. She knows what she’s talking about,” Hermione said.

“Captain, when have you last eaten?”

“I don’t know!”

“You don’t know when you’ve last eaten, but you’re not looking for food in the kitchen?”

“Didn’t I say I was looking for a fucking snack?”

“In a vinegar bottle?”  
“I don’t have time for this shit,” Charlie muttered, and moved to leave the kitchen. Angelina stepped forward to block him. Charlie took a step sideways, and Angelina blocked him again.

“Angelina, get out of my way.”

“Charlie, I know we don’t really know each other,” Audrey said, rubbing her hands together nervously. “But the way things are going, I don’t think you have time not to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Charlie, you’re not sleeping regularly, you’re eating sporadically. I think the only thing you’re doing consistently is drinking,” Hermione said quietly.

“Well, what the fuck do you expect me to do with myself? Nothing else to do in this godforsaken shithole! Can’t I drink without everyone jumping down my fucking throat? Does my Hogsmeade permission form not allow me butterbeer?”

“Oh please!” Angelina snarled back, jabbing a finger into his chest. “If we were talking about butterbeer do you think we’d be standing here right now? You’re deliberately endangering yourself! You splinched yourself from drunk apparating, you rolled up this morning covered in blood and you get yourself in another brawl tonight? At this rate you’ll be dead before the week is out!”

“What everyone is trying to say, Charlie,” Audrey interjected, gently pushing Angelina’s hand away, “is that they’re worried about you. They’re afraid of losing you to addiction.”

Charlie whipped his hand against an open cupboard door and smashed it shut, the blow cracking his knuckles open again.

“I’m sorry who I am, what I am, is so damn inconvenient for everyone! I know it would be easier for everyone if I could show up with a smile on my face for these lovely little family functions and play the part and not let my own feelings get in the way of the role you want me to play in your lives. I’m sorry if the fact that I’m a real person got in the way of the fact that I’m not who you want me to be!”

“Captain,” Angelina said, with a tremble in her voice. “We’ve never expected you to be perfect, to stand on ceremony. We want to be here for you when you’re so obviously miserable. But you’ve been so blind to see that we’re trying to be here for you. But I can’t, I won’t watch you kill yourself. Event at your worst, I can’t help but look up to you. No matter what you do or say, you will always be the one who encouraged and mentored me when I was a nameless muggleborn who had no one or nothing. I will not let you die like this. You’re too good for this.”

“Angelina,” Charlie said, his voice hoarse. “I’m not killing myself.”

She shook her head and wiped the corner of her eye.

“I don’t think you’ve ever been okay with the fact that you’re not invulnerable. It’s why you finished a match with a broken arm, it’s why you went to work with dragons, and I think that’s why you’re trying to numb yourself now. I don’t think you’re okay with being hurt, and I think that’s why you can’t see the damage you’ve done to yourself and to us.”

“I never wanted to hurt you,” Charlie said. He knew he’d been short, been snapping, been lashing out, but he’d never meant for it to truly hurt anyone. He’d meant to be mean, but not genuinely hurtful.

“And, Captain… George was looking for some clothes for you in case you had to stay at MLE, and we found…” Angelina paused and shared a look with Audrey, who nodded at her in encouragement, “we found this letter from your boss. We know you’re not here on vacation.”

Charlie stared silently at Rolf’s yellowed letter clutched in her hand. He hated it more than anything else in the world, almost as much as he hated himself. He should have burned them. Thankfully he’d kept Theo’s letter hidden in his coat pocket. He couldn’t fathom the disaster he’d be facing if they’d found Theo’s letter too.

“I should have burned that,” he said quietly. “But it’s none of your fucking business.”

“Charlie, I’d rather have you here yelling at me than off in Romania, withering on your own,” Angelina said. 

“Charlie, look around you,” Audrey said. 

Charlie looked around him and was horrified. He had thought that he’d been more orderly in his search of the kitchen, sure, maybe he was making a little mess, but not one that couldn’t be cleaned up quickly enough with a rag to cover his tracks.

It would have to be quite the rag.

The kitchen floor was covered in a fine layer of flour from a ruptured sack he’d thoughtlessly tossed over his shoulder. Olive oil pooled where the floor dipped, and his mother’s beloved spice rack was overturned and the little jars scattered haphazardly.

It was dim, but it was light enough to see over Angelina’s shoulder to where his mother stood in her patchwork bathrobe at the base of the stairs, covering her hand with her mouth. She turned and rushed up the stairs, her steps punctuated by a door slam.

“I’m sorry,” Charlie said, disgusted with himself at the damage he’d wrought without realizing. “I didn’t realize anyone cared.”

Charlie waited in the uncomfortable silence, wishing more than ever that he had a wand so that he could clean his mother’s kitchen. 

Audrey stepped forward. “You need a different physical environment, and you need to detox. I’ve talked to Percy, and he’d okay with it if you come to stay with us. A healer from St. Mungo’s is going to be checking on you regularly. You and I will talk, a lot. It’ll be hard. But it’ll be good. For everyone, but especially for you. All these people here care about you and are willing to do anything to see you healthy. They want their brother back.”

“Their brother is their imagined version of who they thought I was,” Charlie spat. “I’m not who they think I am, and I never was.”

“I think they know that. But they already lost Fred, and they can’t bear to lose you too. Please do this.”

Charlie swallowed hard. He missed Fred. He hadn’t really thought about it, but he did. How had he gone so long without thinking about Fred dying? 

“Okay.”


	7. Chapter 7

“You look different.”

Charlie smiled weakly. It had been three days since the vomiting stopped and two since the shaking and tremors. The fever was gone, but he was still weak. He looked like hell and he knew it.

“I was sick. Haven’t been eating well.”

“Oh no, you like good,” Gabriel said. “Fine. I mean, I can tell that you’ve been sick, but it definitely looks like, you know, you’re less sick now.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said.

Gabriel smiled and drummed his fingers on the countertop. “Can I help you with something?”

“Oh. Yeah. I need a wand.”

“Well, you’ve come to the right place! I have it on good authority that the Ollivander’s make the best wands. You’re not looking for one of those kitschy wand cane contraptions that Gregorovitch has been peddling, are you?”

“Uh, no.”

Gabriel smiled and nodded. “Good! You looking for a dueling wand? I’ve rigged something up that will store a blasting spell in stasis that can be fired without an incantation! Need one of those?”

Charlie cocked his head. That would have come in handy.

“No, just a regular wand. Lost my old one. I had to have my brother take me into Diagon today, sad as that is.”

“Oh, so you need to be properly fitted then!” Gabriel yanked his sleeves above his elbows and ducked under the counter. He emerged with a length of measuring tape draped over his neck. 

“What are you doing?” Charlie asked as Gabriel hopped over the counter and seized his forearm. “Aren’t you going to hand me a wand and tell me to give it a wave?”

Gabriel scoffed. “ Are you kidding?” he said, a pen dangling out of his mouth. “Look at those boxes. What do you notice about them?”

Charlie stared at the floor to ceiling wand boxes, about which he found nothing extraordinary. “They’re all the same color?”

“Wrong! I mean, you’re right, all of them are a nice charcoal gray; it doesn’t show dust quite as fast as black, you see, but no! They are orderly, they are neat, and they are organized!” Gabriel said, voice swelling with pride. He slipped the measuring tape around Charlie’s wrist and wrote down a pair of numbers on the back of his hand.

“Do you know who had to clean up the mess after each and every ‘give it a wave?’ It was me! I trudged out and rearranged every damn box for those snot nosed kids. So there is no more ‘give it a wave.’ I mean, there is, but only in the designated wand testing area and only once I am ninety percent sure I have the right wand.”

“How can you tell?” Charlie asked as Gabriel poked and prodded his bicep. 

“What do you know of wandlore?”

“A little less than nothing?” Charlie confessed. Gabriel had moved on to examining the lines on his palm. He nodded and wrote down another set of numbers.

Gabriel cocked an eye in amusement. “Magic. Let’s just say it’s magic.”

“Good answer.”

“I know. Touch of divination, splash of arithmancy, a whole gallon of good guessing. Just out of curiosity, what was your old wand?”

Charlie winced. It wasn’t his first wand, but he’d been attached to it nonetheless. “Apple. Dragon heartstring core.”

Gabriel rolled his eyes. “Of course. What kind of apple? Did my father tell you? Granny Smith? Gala?”

“I… I have no idea. Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters! That’s the trouble with using domesticated trees for wand wood, especially fruiting trees. There’s so much difference between a tree that will yield a sweet red apple and one that’ll give you a sour green, you know, and you can’t trust a dealer to remember, especially if you’re buying the wood in November. I mean, if I can harvest it myself I’ll use it, otherwise, no. Birthday month?”

“December. Does it bother Mr. Ollivander you do things differently?”

Gabriel shook his head, then stepped back to the counter, spun a notepad to face him, and transcribed the numbers he’d written on his hand. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Sure.”

“Every Ollivander runs the show differently. Sure, I take what I can from my father, who took what he could from his father, and so on, and amalgamate it into something that works,” he said. Charlie craned his neck to peer over Gabriel’s shoulder and watched him plot the numbers he’d collected into points on a graph and draw lines between them. “Wandlore is a lot like the wands themselves. What works for me will not work for you and vice versa. It’s what makes it so damn hard. Also what makes it fun.

“But not everyone can do this. You can’t just line up dummy wands and drop a bunch of seemingly magical cores into them and expect to get a functional wand at the end of it. Your apple tree? Say it had been struck by lightning and listed to the east, and had a cancerous burl on its north face and the wood was harvested in the evening after the first frost. Can I plop in a unicorn tail hair from a unicorn that’s thirteen years old and was born in the evening?”

“...maybe?”

“Wrong! I mean, if by ‘maybe,’ you meant mostly no. It’d be a fucking disaster. It’d be a Gregorovitch wand, and you could kiss your hand goodbye!”

“Sounds rough.”

“It would be rough! If you’re lucky you’ll find some of your fingers on the way to St. Mungo’s!” Gabriel pushed his steel rimmed glass back to the top of the nose and squinted at the chart he’d just drafted. “I think you might be a good candidate for one of my new Albatross cores. Maybe with… black walnut?”

Gabriel hopped onto a rolling ladder and slid down an aisle and plucked a wandbox off a shelf. 

“Catch!” he said, tossing the box at Charlie. It landed ten feet to Charlie’s right. Gabriel remained frozen on the ladder, his arm outstretched and his neck blushing a deep red.

“Did you see that?” Gabriel asked quietly.

Charlie nodded.

“Can you pretend you didn’t?”

Charlie nodded again. He bent over and scooped up the box.

Until he opened the wand box, Charlie had never really appreciated how beautiful a wand could be. He’d only been without one for a week and even that had been crippling. It could have been far worse; Percy and Audrey’s apartment was deep in muggle London so he had no trouble getting around. But he was completely cut off from Diagon Alley and wizarding London. Without a wand he couldn’t even enter Diagon Alley by himself, call the Knight bus, not even a desperate attempt to apparate. He didn’t notice his wand’s absence during the first few days of detox, he couldn’t think about anything beyond the confines of the toilet. Once he could keep food down he finally noticed how profoundly helpless he felt without a wand.

“Can I give it a wave?” Charlie asked, rolling the wand between his fingers and admiring the grain of the espresso colored wood.

“No! I mean, yes, but not here. Come on, to the wand testing area.”

Charlie followed Gabriel into a long, narrow gallery, brightly lit by a dozen sconces but otherwise devoid of decoration. 

“You’re pretty serious about this wand testing area, huh?”

Gabriel cocked an eyebrow. “I get, what, between sixty and eighty new Hogwarts students a year? Plus maybe twenty older students who don’t appreciate what they were given and broke their first wand, plus another couple dozen adults who either break a wand or decide they’re going to be a duelist now and need a specialty rig? That’s upwards of a hundred and twenty huge fucking messes that I have to clean up? No, no, and no. I don’t get paid enough. Well? Why are you just standing there? Give it a wave!”

Charlie stepped into a chalk circle drawn on the floor and whipped the wand in front of him, sending a blast of unformed red energy down the gallery to splash brightly against the wall.

Gabriel nodded in approval. “That’ll do.”

“What do I owe you?”

Gabriel screwed up his face. “Don’t worry about it.”

“What?”

“Just, don’t worry about it!” he blustered, his face reddening.

“Gabriel, come on. I know these things aren’t cheap, or easy to make.”

Gabriel shrugged and straightened his shoulders, visibly regaining his composure. “Technically that’s a prototype. It could literally blow up in your face, mini mushroom cloud. Consider the risk your assuming payment. But, I mean, don’t worry that it’s going to blow up. It won’t. Probably. It’s only slightly more likely to blow up than a wand with a more conventional core.”

Charlie wasn’t especially worried about the wand exploding. He had a feeling Gabriel wouldn’t give him anything truly dangerous. “What’s a mushroom cloud?” Charlie asked instead. It sounded like the exact sort of slimy and smelly thing that George would market to children for an exorbitant price.

“Don’t worry about it. And, when someone asks you why your enchantments are suddenly twice as potent, you just send them old Gabriel’s way for a wand without one of those stodgy old cores.”

“Thanks. See you around?”

“Yeah. Stop back occasionally and let me know how that’s working for you.”

Charlie nodded and stood fidgeting silently. 

“I’ll see you later then,” he said. The air suddenly felt stuffy. He turned and stepped out of the wand testing area and let himself out of the shop. 


	8. Chapter 8

It was cold still in Diagon, but it was the kind of cold that merely cleared the sinuses rather than than cutting the bone. Charlie wanted to stop by George’s shop before heading back to Percy’s. He’d been such an asshole the last time he’d been by that he felt he ought to pay him an honest visit and see his shop in earnest. At the same time though, he felt a strong aversion for George’s shop. It was so steeped in Fred and George that going to see just George made Fred’s loss feel all the more raw. 

“Hey Ron,” Charlie said as he stepped inside. Ron nodded at him over the heads of tiptoeing Hogwarts students craning their necks to see his product demonstration of the latest Weasley gewgaw. 

“Charlie! Good to see you!” George said with a grin, appearing from behind a display of brightly wrapped boxes. “Looking to buy?”

“I have no money,” Charlie said.

George narrowed his eyes. “Well then you can get the hell out!”

There was a collective gasp from the young Hogwarts students, who stared at George with a look of horror. Ron glared and mouthed a curse. 

“Just testing the new swear jar!”George explained quickly, pointing at a nearby shelf, which indeed did contain a jar filled with coins. “Put in a sickle and it’ll swear at you!”

The students oohed and turned back to Ron’s demonstration.

“Nice cover.”

“Thanks. Maybe now it’ll actually sell.” 

“In the meantime, maybe you should enchant your demo jar to apparate every coin to your Gringotts vault. Then it won’t matter if it sells.”

George glanced back and forth between Ron and Charlie. “You need a job? I’ll fire Ron. Mind you, being family, I can legally only pay you in store credit.”

Charlie watched Ron retch violently into a bucket and the students began to cheer. “I think I’m good. Done enough vomiting to last a lifetime.”

“That’s a shame. Well then, you’re forfeiting your share of the swear jar.”

“Fine.”

“So what brings you to Diagon today?”

Charlie drew his wand and held it up. “Getting a new wand. Figured I’d stop by.”

“What happened to your old wand?”

“Got jumped in Knockturn by a couple of spineless thugs.”

George nodded sympathetically. “Fair enough. Explains the vomit and blood on your sweater at Ginny’s game. Though, little pointer, next time you get the shit beat out of you, don’t say they were spineless thugs. Say they were, I don’t know, thugs so scary that Dementors don’t like being around them too long.”

“Point taken. Anyway, yeah, I came to Diagon to pick up a new wand at Ollivander’s.” 

“Ah. So that’s why you have no money. That thief Ollivander up and robbed you.”

“He did not. Didn’t even charge me,” Charlie blurted, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

George crossed his arms. “He didn’t charge you? Charlie, do not use that wand. He’s using you as a pawn in his vendetta against me. That wand will no doubt kill you.”

“Gabriel Ollivander has a vendetta against you?” Charlie repeated incredulously.

“Don’t give me that look. I believed you when you told me you got jumped in an alley.”

“I did! Look at my face!” Charlie pointed at the faded cut under his eye.

George shrugged. “Look the same as ever.”

“Stop.” 

“Are you sure you weren’t ‘jumped’ in a back alley the same way you were ‘jumped’ at Ginny’s match?”

“Okay, I never said I didn’t start that fight at Ginny’s game. But there was a good reason for it.”

“Uh huh.”

“Fartos!” Ron shouted, and a large fart noise cut off Charlie’s retort. The students gathered around Ron squealed with glee, all except for one red faced student in a blue scarf. Ron lowered his wand and handed it over to the students, who wrestled it back and forth amongst each other.

“Selling wands and spells now?”

George shook his head slowly, his jaw clenched.

“Technically, the Fartmaster is not a wand. It is classified as a ‘multi-use spell-like device.’ Your little friend Ollivander made sure of that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Stenchwand was the original name of the Fartmaster, but Ollivander threw a fit,” George said with a forlorn sigh, and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “He went to the Ministry and convinced them to issue me a cease and desist because I am not credentialed as a wandmaker, therefore none of my products can be called a wand, unless I make them with an orange tip, in which case I can market them as a ‘joke-wand,’ but, and I repeat word for word, the words ‘joke’ and ‘wand’ may not be separated by anything other than a hyphen in any name or marketing materials, so I would have to call it the ‘Stench Joke-Wand,’ which is ridiculous!”

“Sounds tedious,” Charlie said, judging the distance to the door to see if he could make a break for it before George caught his breath. It was too far.

“That’s only the half of it!”

“It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me the other half.”

“But the thing about the joke-wand classification is that it can only be enchanted with one so-called ‘imitation incantation,’ so I would have to limit the Fartmaster to ‘Fartos’ and only ‘Fartos,’ which defeats the entire purpose of the product line.”

Charlie checked his watch.

“See, I’m working on ‘Fartos Maxima’ for the 2000, so all these kids who are buying the ‘Classic Fartmaster’ today will come rushing out to buy the ‘Fartmaster 2000’ when it comes off the production line in the spring. It’s called planned obsolescence Charlie, and it’s brilliant. I can sell the same thing to the same customers twice! Which is essential if I’m going to recoup the legal fees I had to pay to Granger and Granger Associates in order to get the Fartmaster classified as a ‘multi-use spell-like device.’”

“Sounds like a lot of work for a wand that makes someone fart.”

“It doesn’t even make someone fart,” George whispered, checking over his shoulder to make sure none of the students battling for the last Fartmaster box could hear him over the sounds of the jangling register. “See, if it made someone fart, i.e., force involuntary bodily functions, I couldn’t legally call it either a joke-wand or a multi-use spell-like device. The only reason I get away with the puking pastilles is because arguably, like Bertie Bott’s Every Flavored Beans, the ‘intended consumer’ voluntarily consents to the potentially transformative effects of the product.”

“So then the Fartmaster…”

“Promise to keep a secret?”

Charlie looked around incredulously. “Who would I tell? I have no friends in this country that I’m not related to somehow.”

George gave him an appraising look and then nodded. “Fine. The Fartmaster, when triggered with the ‘imitation incantation,’ only tags a location from which the sound and smell of a preloaded fart emanate. Hence the appearance of ‘making someone fart.’ Even if you miss, though, it’s all good fun when a potted plant lets it rip.”

Charlie smiled in spite of himself. “Ingenious. Merlin himself could do no better.”

“Shut up. Aren’t you the one who got jumped in an alleyway?”

“You got jumped in an alleyway?” Ron repeated, after he shut the door behind the students, bright red Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes bags in their hands.

“Yeah. By fucking ninjas who waited until they could get the drop on me because they knew they couldn’t take me in a fair fight,” Charlie said. George tapped him with his fist approvingly.

Ron whistled. “Sounds rough.”

“It was rough. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I spotted them at Ginny’s game, and I lost them in the crowd after I got knocked down. It all gets blurry after that.”

Ron scratched his chin pensievely. He looked strange with the tuft of a beard on his chin. 

“No offense, Charlie, by why would anyone want to jump you? You’ve been out of the country for so long, it’s not like anyone in England really knows you to have a grudge against you. And you don’t exactly look like someone who’s loaded, so it couldn’t be a typical mugging.”

“That’s a very good point, Ron,” George said suspiciously. “You sure you’re Ron and not Hermione in polyjuice again?”

Ron rolled his eyes and flicked his wand at the ‘Out to Lunch’ sign, flipping it around so it faced the street. 

“I know I don’t run my mouth much, but I did break into Gringotts, break into Malfoy manor, and what else? Oh yeah, I did destroy a horcrux and go toe to toe with more than my fair share of Death Eaters. I know my way around a mystery. You could be in worse hands.”

“What’s a horcrux?” Charlie asked.

“What’s a Death Eater?” George asked, sticking out his tongue. Charlie punched him in the shoulder.

“Okay, okay,” George said, rubbing his shoulder with a wounded look. “Anyway, Ron makes a good point. Did they say anything to you? Steal anything? Not that you’ve anything worth stealing.”

Charlie nodded, choosing to ignore the jibe. “Yeah. I recognized them at the match by their voices. They were careful to make sure I didn’t see their faces when they first jumped me. Said some nonsense about ‘we know why you’re back in the country,’ and, ‘we don’t play nice in our family, blah, blah, blah.’” Charlie shrugged. “Not much to go on, really.”

“He’s right,” George said, and turned to Ron. “We should call Hermione.”

“No! I’m not bringing Hermione into this. Not yet, anyway. Where did you see them at the match?”

“I first ran into them while I was getting some booze from a bootleg vendor where the old locker rooms were,” Charlie confessed. “Then they were going into the Falmouth stands when I lost track of them.”

“And where did they jump you?”

“Knockturn.”

“Generally shady types, then,” Ron said, furrowing his brow. 

“I’d say so.”

“I guess the question is, what family would have a vendetta against you specifically and not any other Weasley? You pick fights back in Romania, too?”

Charlie froze. He could easily think of one person he had been close to in Romania who had something to lose from Charlie returning to England. Could he really be so bitter as to have him beaten in an alley?

“Theo,” he whispered, the name coming unbidden.

“The who?” George and Ron repeated in unison.

Charlie shook his head. “Nothing. I didn’t say anything. I should get going.” 

“You’ve thought of something! I know you have! It’s easy to tell because you barely ever make that face!” George shouted after Charlie as he turned on his heel and headed for the door. Charlie shrugged and opened the door to a blast of cold air.

“Where are you going?” Ron asked.

“To see if I still have a job.”


	9. Chapter 9

He did still have a job, but per Audrey’s instructions he had to stand outside of the bar. He knew she was right; his head swam every time the bar door open and he caught a whiff of alcohol. Now he had the enviable position of standing in the cold to make sure that nobody Artemis kicked out tried to sneak back in. They threw insults after she shut the door, but one by one without fail they picked themselves up and staggered into the night. 

“Not the first time we’ve made this sort of… accommodation,” Artemis had told him. “Just don’t make a habit of getting arrested. Once is fine, helps your reputation down here, but we still have a business to run.”

At least he didn’t have as many sweaty drunks getting in his face outside. He kept a close watch on every passerby to see if by chance his attackers walked by. He doubted they would be so sloppy, but he needed something to do to distract him from the cold and the boredom. It was also a welcome distraction from Theo’s letter, and from Theo himself, memories of whom came bubbling up to the forefront of his mind now that he was sober. 

Before talking to Ron and George it hadn’t crossed his mind that Theo personally paid some Knockturn muscle to bloody him up a bit in an alleyway. He couldn’t imagine Theo could be vicious enough to have him beaten. Sure, he tended to be spiteful, downright cruel when he was in one of his moods. But he was quick to apologize once the moment had past, admit when he was in the wrong. 

Charlie shook his head, and let his hand drift down toward his wand as a hooded figure crunched past him through the snow and vanished down a side street. He relaxed once he was alone again. Whoever it was, it wasn’t a thug sent by an ex-lover.  

It still blew his mind that Theo could have done that. Charlie knew that he deserved to get the shit knocked out of him, but Theo had wronged him, not the other way around. It was Theo who had to go off and get married, it was Theo that had the bright idea that Charlie eat scraps off of Daphne’s table, and now Theo had the audacity to have him beaten? Charlie hadn’t come back to England to blackmail or extort, but right about now blackmail and extortion were starting to sound like a good idea. 

If he did, maybe he wouldn’t haven’t to stand outside a seedy bar in Knockturn Alley in the bitter cold just to make a few galleons. 

Charlie frowned as he noticed a small man in a brown fedora bouncing down the alley. He had no low hood, no high collar to awkwardly obscure his face.

“Gabriel?” Charlie asked as he passed under the flickering gaslamp.

“Oh, hey uh, Charlie,” Gabriel said, spinning to face him with a sheepish smile.

“What brings you to Knockturn?”

Gabriel shrugged and pulled his coat tighter around him and stepped out of the wind next to Charlie. 

“I like your scarf,” Charlie blurted. It was true, Gabriel’s bright blue scarf worked for his complexion. He wished he hadn’t said anything.

Gabriel cocked an eyebrow. “Just out for a stroll. You know, seeing the sights, smelling the… smells.”

“Nothing like the eau de piss you find coating the walls down here, eh? You safe coming down here by yourself?” Charlie asked. He had a feeling Gabriel would be fine, Charlie really just wanted to know if Gabriel was with anybody, or on the way to be with anybody. 

“You’re sweet. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Well, I did get the shit beat out of me a couple of blocks that way by two very competent thugs. You might even call them ninjas.”

Gabriel watched him closely, as if waiting for the punchline.

“I’m not kidding. Do you want me to walk you out of here? At least to Diagon proper?”

“This may come as a surprise to you,” Gabriel said, squeezing Charlie’s shoulder, “but I’m Gabriel fucking Ollivander, and I may or may not have started a rumor a few years ago that you can’t use a wand against its maker. Nobody’s felt like putting it to the test.”

“Clever.”

“What can I say, Ravenclaw wins the House Cup. Seriously though, they did this year. Now that Harry Potter isn’t there throwing off the scores.”

The door to the Department of Mysteries swung open and Artemis shoved a shamble of robes out and into a snowbank. She glared at Charlie and Gabriel and slammed the door shut again.

“Should I leave you be so you can work? I don’t want to get you in trouble,” Gabriel said, looking nervously at the door and the man groaning in the snowbank. 

“Nah. They barely pay me anyway. Took a pay cut when I shifted to doorman. They really don’t even check to see if I’m still out here. As long as that guy doesn’t crawl back inside I’ve done my job.”

Gabriel nodded. In the gray light his long wool coat and fedora looked less like an anachronistic costume and he appeared more like a vintage picture come to life. 

“Do you miss working with dragons?”

Charlie didn’t know what to say at first. He glanced down at the scorch mark on the sleeve on his coat.

“Hadn’t really thought about it. Guess that means I don’t miss it as much as I thought I would. I loved it, don’t get me wrong. It was who I was for a long time. But…” he stopped, his voice catching in his throat. 

“But?”

Charlie swallowed. Gabriel’s attention was almost overwhelming. His eye contact was intense. 

“But I think I was starting to get lonely. I still could go back, in a few more months, if they’ll have me, but I don’t know if I want to. Stupid as it sounds, I think I’m getting too old for following dragons around on brooms all day.”

“What do you think you’ll do then?”

Charlie laughed, surprising himself. “No idea. One of my brothers offered me my other brother’s job, but I think that might be awkward at breakfast. All I know is I can’t stand outside chewing cud forever.”

“Eh. You’ve got a lot going for you. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

Charlie wasn’t sure if it was the cold, the late hour, the fact that he wasn’t about to throw up for the first time in months, or a combination of all three, but he suddenly felt a surge of boldness rising. He turned toward Gabriel and planted his hand on the wall over Gabriel’s shoulder.

“Yeah? Like what?” he asked, leaning in close.

Gabriel reached up and swept snow away from Charlie’s scarf.

“Mmm. Those shoulders. Not a lot a of wizards have shoulders like those,” Gabriel said quietly. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Sure,” Charlie said, his heart pounding as his breath fogged Gabriel’s glasses.

“I didn’t need to feel your arms to match you for a wand.”

Charlie smiled. “I didn’t figure.”

“Oh! Heya Charlie!”

“Fucking shit!” Charlie spat, whirling around to see whoever had such impeccable timing as to ruin what was about to be a very nice moment. 

It was Bill.

“Bill,” Charlie said, gritting his teeth. Everytime he thought Bill’s most inconvenient appearance in his life was past, Bill proved him wrong. “What brings you here tonight, away from your lovely wife and child?” 

“Borgin and Burke’s,” he said, flashing a smug smile. Charlie wanted to put him in a headlock and bury his head in snow so he didn’t have to look at that smug smile for another instant. “They’re way behind on their mortgage refinance, and they thought they’d scare me away by changing their business hours to only one to two AM every third Saturday morning. Didn’t work though.” Bill rubbed his hands together briskly.

“You don’t say.”

“I mean, come on, they sell one of those hand things, maybe a weird dagger each week? That’s not enough to cover interest, let alone chip away at principal. By the way, I’m Bill Weasley.” Bill gave Gabriel’s hand a firm shake. Gabriel smiled weakly, looking helplessly at Charlie. “But I’m sure baby brother Charlie has told you all about me, about how I was a curse breaker in Egypt until I broke all the curses.”

“He moved back home from Egypt to be closer to Mom to help with his daughter,” Charlie said flatly.

“Um, no, that sounds like you.”

“I moved back home to help raise your daughter?”

“I’m Gabriel Ollivander. We’ve met.”

“Have we?” Bill squinted. “Must be the hat.”

“I like his hat.”

“Says the guy wearing a coat made out of oversized cockroaches. Say, Ollivander, fancy a refinance? Interest rates are at a historic low and I’d hate for you to miss out.”

Gabriel glanced back and forth between Bill and Charlie, shifting uneasily. “Uh, we own the building. You know what they say, first there was Ollivander’s, then there was the Thames, and they started calling it London.”

Bill nodded. “Yes, yes, of course. I should have guessed. You don’t seem the sort to rack up thousands in gambling debts. Unlike some shopkeepers I know,” he said, pointing his thumb toward Borgin and Burke’s.

“Bill, I think you were leaving,” Charlie began, crossing his arms. 

“In a minute!”

“And never coming back,” Charlie finished.

“Seriously though, Ollivander, where have we met? I feel like it wasn’t a business meeting. I’m usually pretty good with faces, important for customer satisfaction, you know.”

“Back at Hogwarts. I was a year behind you.”

“Ah. Good times, Hogwarts. I was the king of the world back then. But I’m sure Charlie told you about all my exploits.”

Gabriel nodded, a smirk playing at his lips. “Yeah, I was telling him about that time during my first year when I think it was you, ah hell, let’s be honest, of course I remember, it was you who fell out of the stands during a Quidditch game with a your own initials painted on your chest, but you painted it in the mirror so it was WB instead of BW.”

Bill’s self assured grin vanished.

“That wasn’t me,” he said quickly. That was… Bernard. Wallace. Bernard Wallace.”

“Bernard Wallace, eh? Was it also Bernard Wallace who tried streaking past Ravenclaw tower but forgot that the stairs moved and got stuck on a landing with McGonagall and Snape?”

Bill looked around, scanning for an escape route. “I think that may have also been Bernard. I’m not sure. I heard about it from a friend who heard about it from a portrait. Definitely didn’t see it.”

“And then there was that time when Bernard-”

“I think we’ve heard enough about Bernard, don’t you?”

“I could stand to hear more,” Charlie said, gleefully committing to memory the rare look of shame on Bill’s face. 

“Another time, I guess,” Gabriel said with a shrug. “Anyway, I have an errand to run tomorrow and could stand to have some… muscle to back me up. Meet me at my shop at 2:30?”

Charlie nodded, swallowing hard.

“See you then. Bill, it’s been a pleasure. Say hi to Bernard for me.” Gabriel tipped his hat into the night, disappearing into the light snow flurry. 

“You made me look like an idiot in front of that Ollivander guy,” Bill said irritably. 

“What, are you trying to have sex with him?”

“No,” Bill snorted. “Were you?”

“No,” Charlie said quickly. Too quickly.

“Oh my god, you were!”

“No I wasn’t!”

“Nope, you were, oh my god you were! That’s why you were all up on him when I walked up! I thought you were about to pound him, but you were… about to pound him! Oh my god, oh my god!”

“Bill. Stop.”

“Oh my god!”

“Bill, you’re babbling.”

“I’m just letting the last thirty years of my life start to make sense! There was that time when … oh my god, I’m going to have to tell Fleur she was right! Oh my god, so was it like, constant in Gryffindor tower?”

“Bill. Go home.”

“That Oliver Wood guy, he worshipped you. I mean, worshipped you. So, did that happen?”

Charlie scoffed. “Yeah. Because I’d totally be into thick necked Quidditch types.”

Bill stared blankly. It looked like he was about to pull a muscle thinking from too hard. “Of course not,” Bill said when he finally mustered some composure, “that would be ridiculous. Wouldn’t it? I have no idea how this works.”

“Get Fleur to explain it to you, if she knows so damn much. Now, are you leaving? I have work to do.”

“Does Mum know?” Bill asked, suddenly serious.

“What do you think? Have you seen that family tree she had painted? I’m surprised she hasn’t started inviting over eligible young women for dinner!”

“Does this have anything to do with you losing your job in Romania?”

“Bill, I don’t want to talk about it. And I didn’t lose my job.”

Bill shook his head wearily. “Fine Charlie. I’ll leave it alone for now.”

Charlie groaned, knocking his head against the cold brick. “Leave it alone for a long while Bill. I’ve had a long fucking day. Go home, Bill.”

“Good night, Charlie. Don’t splinch yourself.”


	10. Chapter 10

Charlie learned about puffskeins in the very first lesson in his first year of Care of Magical Creatures. He vividly recalled the keen sense of disappointment wash over him when Professor Kettleburn fumbled open a basket with his unwieldy prosthetic to reveal a pile of mewling balls of puffy fur and darting tongues. He was doubly disappointed when Kettleburn announced that half of their grade for the year was dependent on the survival of their assigned puffskein.

Charlie named his puffskein Wyvern, and was more upset than he was proud to admit when Wyvern perished from food poisoning the day after their final exams. As much as he had enjoyed Wyvern’s purring and mewling, he had never again felt the need to adopt another.

Nor had he realized, having only had one puffskein, which Kettleburn inspected weekly for good grooming and healthy body weight, that their fur made his eyes itch.

He only realized this on Madame MacMillan’s overstuffed loveseat. He assumed it was probably embroidered with an ugly floral pattern because that was what old people liked. Charlie couldn’t be sure, however, because her loveseat, much like everything else in her quaint countryside cottage, including Madame MacMillan, was coated in a dense layer of greasy yellow puffskein fur. 

“Would you dears like some tea?” she asked as he and Gabriel settled into the loveseat across from her. Gabriel sneezed and wiped his nose with a handkerchief, his eyes puffy.

“No thank you,” they said in unison, noting the yellow hairs protruding from the lip of her own teacup.

“Let me know if you change your mind,” she said as she took a sip. The china cup rattled against the saucer as she cradled it in her tiny hands with disproportionately large knuckles.

“Twenty four,” Charlie muttered in disbelief as he finished counting the puffskeins that he could see, nestled within bookshelves and couch cushions and even one clinging to the lapel of Madame Macmillan’s faded pink blazer. Charlie assumed it was pink, again he couldn’t quite tell, but pink is what he imagined was a favorite color of old ladies living out their golden years in the countryside. It just as easily could have been red or purple, but between the dirty yellow light filtering in through the musty drapes and the ubiquitous dirty yellow fur and his itching eyes, it was impossible to be certain of anything.

“So I am very curious to see this wand you mentioned in your letter,” Gabriel said, watching with alarm as a puffskein slowly waddled from the arm of the loveseat to his knee, leaving a trail of fur in its wake. It came to a halt on Gabriel’s thigh, wheezed twice, and spat a phlegmy furball onto his pants. Gabriel looked at Charlie with alarm, then the creaking grandfather clock, then back at Charlie.

“Ah yes, of course,” she said, and then she sneezed. Great clouds of fur drifted into the air and slowly wafted down to settle on the coffee table, her cups and saucers, and on Charlie and Gabriel.

She very gingerly reached into a basket hanging off the side of her rocking chair and withdrew a carved wooden box. Very slowly she leaned in and blew away a layer of dust and fur before undoing the clasp and turning it around to present Gabriel with a pale wand resting on a bed of black velvet.

“May I?” Gabriel asked. Madame MacMillan nodded somberly and Gabriel reached forward and delicately picked it up by both ends with his pointer fingers. He squinted and rolled it over in his hands.

“Elm. One of the classics,” Gabriel said. He tapped the narrow split twisting around the length of the wand. “This is what we call a spiral fracture. Usually see those in high firepower duels when the core overloads and the wood can’t contain the energy anymore, and it splits in this pattern. I could probably salvage the core, those usually survive spiral fractures, but the wood is completely shot.”

“But it’s value, Mr. Ollivander? It has been in my family for many generations, surely it is valuable to a craftsman like yourself?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Right now, it’s worth nothing. Interesting to be sure, like a fine piece of driftwood, but worthless.”

Madam MacMillan’s mouth dropped open, her lips quivering. “Worthless?” She whispered, eyes welling.

“Well, I mean, if I fix it, it will be valuable again!” Gabriel said quickly, shooting a nervous glance at Charlie. “Nice looking Veela hair in there, be good for enchanting, but right now it’s just a wand that doesn’t do magic.”

“I had hopes that it might be the Bloodwand…” Madame Macmillan trailed off. She reached into a pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, blowing her nose loudly. 

Gabriel covered a snort with a loud cough into his elbow. Charlie couldn’t help but smile.

“Now what would make you think something like that?” Charlie asked, straightening his glasses and folding his hands in his lap.

“It is of elm, as you say, favored by the purest families. And it has been in my family for generations now.” 

“Three,” Gabriel blurted. “I mean, unless you have a high generational turnaround, in which case,” Gabriel counted on his fingers, “five?”

Charlie winced as Madame MacMillan’s eyes teared up again. She dabbed her cheeks with her handkerchief. “Surely you’re mistaken…”

Gabriel chewed on his lip. “I’m going to tell you a secret, Madame MacMillan. I have never seen the Bloodwand. There is nothing in wandlore texts to positively identify anything as the Bloodwand. For all we know, this the core, passed down from a previous wand. Can I ask why it matters?”

Madame MacMillan sniffled and wiped her nose.

“My dear Ernie works terribly hard for the Ministry, Mr. Ollivander, but myself and my home have become a terrible financial burden, especially for a young man earning a young man’s stipend. If he were just looking after himself, he would be all right, but with me…” Madame MacMillan shook her head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ollivander, I didn’t mean to waste your time, I know you must be terribly busy.”

“You wanted it, just to sell it?” Gabriel said in disbelief. “Your family wand?”

Madame MacMillan said nothing. She just continued to dab helplessly at her eyes. 

“Madame, in my family, wands are sacred. It would be a travesty for you to have to sell your family wand.”

“I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you with my poverty,” Madame Macmillan said, her voice tight.

“Cores, however, are not so sacred, and I feel I might make use of a Veela hair. Would you be willing to part with the core, for say, seventy five gallons?”

“Mr. Ollivander…” Madame MacMillan stammered.

“Fine, a hundred. You drive a hard bargain.”

“I simply couldn’t…”

“All right, all right, you win!” Gabriel said, throwing up his hands in surrender, scattering a cloud of puffskein skin. “A hundred and ten, and I’ll repair the wand with a fresh core! That’s all, you can twist your thumbscrews no further, I can make no better offer.”

“Mr. Ollivander!” Madame MacMillan cried, tears streaming openly down her face and her shoulders racking with sobs.

Gabriel ignored her weeping and withdrew a blank promissory note and scribbled in the payment total, and signed in a small print. He slapped it down on the coffee table and replaced the wand in its case and carefully closed it.

“I’ll send an owl when my work is done,” Gabriel said, tucking the case under his arm. “Madame, it has been a pleasure.”

Madame MacMillan gave each of their hands a squeeze and blew her nose as they let themselves out. 

“Gabriel, that’s a small fortune!” Charlie said as he pulled the door shut behind him. “That hair can’t possibly be worth that much. Doesn’t every Veela literally have thousands?”

Gabriel shrugged and whipped his wand at Charlie, sweeping away puffskein fur with a gust of air.

“Well, obviously. This project will be more of a personal interest piece than a profit job. It’s actually not easy getting a legitimate Veela hair suitable for wandwork, at least on this side of the channel. The Ministry controls French imports tightly. Care for lunch? I’m starving.”

“Sure,” Charlie said. Gabriel grabbed his hand and Charlie’s stomach lurched violently as Gabriel apparated.

 

Charlie gasped when they landed and his stomach finished rolling. He wasn’t used to apparating sober. He cleared his throat to regain his composure and glanced around, quickly recognizing the telltale brickwork unique to the alleys of Diagon. 

“So, Gabriel, I’ll be honest, when you said you needed some muscle, I thought you might mean…” 

Gabriel stared blankly for a moment then gasped and clapped a hand over his mouth. “I am so sorry… I realize in hindsight how what I said could have been construed as an innuendo… I mean, I did eventually mean it as an innuendo… just not for today… well, I mean, just not for this afternoon.”

Charlie smirked. “It’s okay, Gabriel.”

Gabriel signed in relief.

“Okay good. Shall we?”

Charlie followed Gabriel into the Leaky Cauldron and immediately halted inside the door. He had never noticed it before, but the place positively reeked of alcohol. That made sense. It was a bar, after all, and the stench of vodka normally clung to Charlie like a loyal dog. The smell had been so ubiquitous for Charlie that he’d stopped noticing it. He began to sway on his feet, swamped with memories of despair and dizziness.

“Hey. You okay?” Gabriel asked, a steadying hand on his shoulder.

Charlie swallowed. He wasn’t sure. No, he was sure. He wasn’t okay. “I can’t drink,” he muttered, his head swimming. 

Gabriel said something, but Charlie couldn’t make it out. He couldn’t tear his gaze away from the empty glasses hanging from hook above the bar. 

Charlie wasn’t quite sure how it happened, but the next thing he knew he was back outside, Gabriel gripping his hand tightly and tapping the coded bricks into Diagon Alley with his wand. The bricks peeled back and Gabriel led him to a bench and sat him down. Charlie pressed the heels of his hands into his closed eyes and counted his breaths, like Audrey had taught him. The cold air quickly cleared the smell of alcohol from his nose and the aching thirst began to a dull to a point where it was tolerable. 

“I’m sorry,” Charlie said at last. He didn’t know how to explain himself. 

“Don’t worry about it. Just, just stay here. Don’t get off this bench. I’ll go get you something to eat.”

Charlie nodded and watched Gabriel dart around the corner into the bustle of Diagon Alley proper. Charlie dropped his head to stare at the cobblestones, pulling his coat tighter around him as the wind picked up. He slipped his hand into his pocket, taking comfort in the presence of his new wand. He hadn’t had an opportunity to use it yet, but it made him feel less isolated all the same. 

He didn’t have to wait long. Gabriel reappeared with a pair of brown paper packets. 

“Hope you like fish sandwiches,” he said, handing one to Charlie and taking a seat next to him. 

Charlie’s mouth watered as the smell of battered fish wafted from the packet. He unwrapped it and savored the smell before taking a bite. 

“This is fucking delicious,” he said, licking the grease off his thumb. 

“Best street food in Diagon,” Gabriel said around a mouthful. “They have the fish apparated in daily. Fresh off the dock.”

They ate silently at first. Audrey had warned him that he needed to eat regularly, even to make sure that he had some candy on him to distract himself, but he really hadn’t taken the suggestion seriously. The fish sandwich proved her right.

“So do people call you out for all sorts of legendary wands, or just the Bloodwand?” Charlie asked. He popped the last piece into his mouth and tossed the paper into a wastebin.

“Just the Bloodwand, really,” Gabriel said, finishing his own sandwich.

“Why?”

“Because of the  _ Sacred Nineteen _ . I got the first owl about a week after that book came out.”

Charlie nodded, grateful to discuss something other his episode, even if it did involve the Sacred Nineteen. “Never read it myself, but my brother said my Mum’s got one. It mentions the Bloodwand?”

Gabriel shook his head. He balled up his sandwich wrapper, looked at the wastebin, looked back at Charlie, then got up and walked over to it and dropped the wrapper inside. Charlie smiled but chose not to comment on Gabriel’s decision not to try to make the throw.

“The story of the Bloodwand connects it to pureblood pride and the  _ Sacred Nineteen _ , not the other way around. I really don’t even know how the story of the Bloodwand got around so fast. It’s only mentioned in a couple of obscure Middle English texts, poems which describe a wand which will defend the one true family in times of need, blah blah blah, you know the old tired purebloody sort of thing. But like I told Madame MacMillan, there’s simply not enough detail in those texts to positively identify any wand. The age of those poems do tell me, however, that for any wand to be old enough to be the Bloodwand, it can’t be of modern make. Which rules out just about every wand anyone’s brought me.”

“How are wands that age made like?”

Gabriel shrugged. “I’ve got a handful of antiques at my shop I can show you sometime. They don’t look like modern wands. Some are more like staffs, some look like branches freshly pulled off the tree. They don’t look anything like the clean, symmetrical wands we use now. The prototype of the modern wand was introduced by my great, great, great,” Gabriel paused to count off fingers, “great, great, great grandfather. So I see a straight, milled wand, I know it can’t be more than a few hundred years old.

“But in a way, Charlie, doesn’t Madame MacMillan’s wand meet the description in the old poems?” Gabriel mused, as much to himself as to Charlie. “The wand is defending her family in its time of need, but instead of physical danger it’s foreclosure she needs protection from.

“But see wands, especially ones as old as the Bloodwand, are nothing special. They look good on the wall but that’s about it. Damn hard to use, too. Anyway, you got plans for Christmas? I’m assuming you and your family get together, yeah?”

“What?” Charlie stammered, jarred by the sudden shift in the conversation. “Christmas?”

“Uh, yeah? It’s a week from Friday. You did know that, right?”

Charlie stood slowly, overwhelmed. “Do you know how many family members I have?” Charlie asked, the blood draining from his face.

Gabriel quirked an eyebrow. “You haven’t bought any presents yet, have you?”

“Not a damn thing.”


	11. Chapter 11

 

Charlie squinted in Borgin and Burke’s dirty yellow lighting, struggling to read the faded titles of their meager book collection. It was doubly difficult knowing that Mr. Borgin was watching him like a hawk, poorly concealed between a pair of skulls not four feet away. Part of him wanted to offer Mr. Borgin a tissue; the old man was obviously suffering with a terrible cold and filled the quiet shop with the rattling sound of wet breathing.

Some of the titles were so dark and morbid that Charlie wondered if they purely planted for ambiance. Who would sincerely write, publish, or buy a book titled  _ Undetectable Poisons for the Elderly? _

It didn’t take long for Charlie to spot what he was looking for. The freshly printed gold lettering of  _ Contemporary Genealogies; or, the Sacred Nineteen _ was easy to read, even in the bad light. 

He pulled it out and flipped to the Nott’s. It was a short chapter. Theo had never spoken much about his family, which was just as well. Charlie liked being with someone who didn’t ramble about family, mostly because Charlie didn’t want to either. It wasn’t all about Hogwarts, quidditch, or who was marrying whom with Theo. Or at least, it hadn’t been. Apparently things had changed.

Turning his attention back to the book, he scowled and scanned through Theo’s genealogy. He expected there to be some Nott family members he hadn’t heard of that might be responsible for attacking him, maybe some branch from France. It seemed he was wrong. Theo didn’t talk about the Nott’s because there weren’t any Nott’s to talk about.

Who was the family his attackers mentioned? A thought struck him and he flipped to a different chapter. Whereas the Nott family filled only half a page, the Greengrass family tree sprawled. His eyes widened; there were at least half a dozen Greengrasses who were old enough to be responsible. Maybe it was Daphne Greengrass’ family who was trying to protect her marriage to the illustrious Nott’s?

Charlie shut the book and slipped it under his arm. He turned and nearly jumped in surprise, finding himself standing nose to crooked nose with Mr. Borgin, who’d left his hiding spot and had somehow stepped behind Charlie without him noticing.

“I want to buy this,” Charlie said, holding up the book.

Mr. Borgin cocked an eyebrow. “What possible reason could a man such as yourself need a book like that for?”

“For reading material while I take a shit, does it matter?”

“It matters,” Mr. Borgin said, the creases on his face sculpted into an indignant scowl.

“Just tell me how much the damn book is.”

Mr. Borgin tilted his head like a naked bird. “For you, Mister Weasley, the very special price of one hundred galleons. And twenty two sickles.”

Charlie felt his face flush red with anger, and took one of those deep diaphragm breaths Audrey insisted that he do. “Is that how far you’re behind on your mortgage?” Charlie asked quietly.

“What?” Mr. Borgin stammered.

“Is that how far you’re behind on your mortgage?” he repeated.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Listen, you give me a fair price or I’ll tell my brother what time of day I found you.”

Mr. Borgin’s lip quivered and he sniffed loudly.

“Seven galleons,” he said at last.

Charlie frowned. Seven galleons still felt like too much for a book which had already collected a layer of dust, but he wasn’t in the mood to argue and risk catching whatever contagious diseases Mr. Borgin was about to sneeze all over him. 

“Fine,” he said, and he fished the coins out of his pocket. He dropped them into Mr. Borgin’s open palm and left without another word.

Charlie all but sprinted through Knockturn, panting heavily when he surfaced into bright Diagon. He barrelled through the crowd and shouldered his way into George’s shop. 

“Do you know any of these people?” Charlie gasped, thrusting forward the  _ Sacred Nineteen _ , his thumb holding it open to the Greengrasses.

George scowled, standing in a pile of brightly colored boxes by an empty fixture.

“Has it ever occurred to you, Charlie, that I might be busy and not have time to help with all your personal problems?”

Charlie’s face fell, and he realized how foolish he must look, sweaty and red faced. “Isn’t that what Ron is for?”

George crossed his arms. “Apparently the document I signed demanding I pay him real money also requires me to give him two days off a week. Damn lawyers.”

“Sounds rough. But let’s be real, no one is going to be buying a dungbomb at ten o’clock on a Monday morning. All the Hogwarts students are in school.”

George huffed. “Not the kind who’ll be buying dungbombs.” 

“Fair enough. But they’re not the kind who’ll care if your shop is messy.”

“Fine. Ask your question.”

“You know any of these people?” Charlie held up the book again. 

George leaned forward and scratched his chin. 

“Where’d you get this? Does Mum know you’re stealing her books? Or reading?”

“Just answer the question.”

“Doesn’t ring any bells,” he said with a shrug, paging through the book. “Sounds like some muggle surnames mixed in here though. Brown? Going by the birthday we should have overlapped at school.”

“Do you track any of your customers’ names?”

“Even if I did, what good would it do you to know their favorite flavor of puking pastille? What are they to you?” George waved his wand and the boxes sorted themselves by color.

“I think some of them might be the fucking ninjas I told you about.”

“Why?” George asked, and with another wave the boxes arranged themselves on the fixture.

“What do you mean, why?”

“Well, if you’re asking me if I know them, that means you don’t know them either. I can understand why someone who’s met you might want to string you up in an alley, but I don’t know why someone who hasn’t met you would want to take the risk. Our family has too many connections these days for random fucking ninjas to take potshots at us. You least of all. You’ve been out of the country for years and have by far the lowest profile.”

“Maybe something that happened in Romania?” Charlie sputtered, not wanting to explain his operating theory to his brother, namely, that he believed the lesser Greengrasses might think he came back to break up the Nott-Greengrass wedding like the spurned lover he was.

“How much trouble could you possibly get into in the backwoods of Romania? You forget to water some pureblood’s pet dragon? Then again, you found a way to get yourself into trouble living with Mum and Dad, so maybe we’ve underestimated you.”

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Charlie fucking Weasley!”

Charlie winced and turned slowly to see Ginny standing in the door with her arms crossed, looking especially dramatic with snow swirling in eddies around her long green coat and high black boots. 

“Shut the door, sis! You trying to heat all of Diagon Alley?” George said in exasperation.

Ginny rolled her eyes and clomped inside, the door slamming behind her. “Sorry Grandpa. I forgot the cold made your joints hurt.”

“I have to pay for that heat you know,” George grumbled.

“Doubt it,” she muttered, before wheeling on Charlie. “You know, Charlie, if any Weasley is going to be dragged out of Harpy Stadium in handcuffs, that Weasley better be me.”

“Sorry?”

“I bet you don’t even know how many throws I made.”

“Twelve?”

Ginny scowled but seemed to accept that answer.

“And the final score?”

“Ginny, you know I don’t know.”

“How long have you been in town now?”

Charlie shrugged. “Month, month and a half? Somewhere in there.”

“And you never came to see me? In a month, month and a half?” she noted, raising an eyebrow.

Charlie felt his face flush. “Listen, Ginny,” he stammered, “since I’ve been back I’ve been a huge fuck up, and I’m playing catchup trying to get my act together. I’m sorry.”

“Hm,” she said. “Fine. You’re off the hook for now. You owe me big time, though.”

“Definitely.”

“You owe me a favor. Like, a real favor.”

“Anything.”

Ginny nodded. “All right. So what have you been getting yourself into these days?”

“Charlie’s been getting his ass beat by some Hogwarts washouts,” George shouted from the other side of the shop.

“I have not!” he protested. “They were fucking ninjas. By the way,” he paused mid sentence to show her the  _ Sacred Nineteen _ and flipped it open to the Greengrasses, “you wouldn’t happen to know any of these people, would you?”

“Does Mom know you’re taking her shit? Tabitha and Renard Brown? No, I don’t recognize them off the top of my head. I’ve got a lot of fans, though. I could have signed a quaffle for them.”

Charlie shook his head. “Yeah, no. I saw them going into the Falmouth stands at your game when I got sidetracked by some of your adoring fans.”

“Falmouth folks, eh? I can ask. Their second beater is a friend of mine.”

“Hang out with the other teams much?”

Ginny shrugged. “Say what you will, Falcons know how to get down. You should check in with Bill too. He knows everyone, and how much they’re worth. How’d you manage to piss someone off this fast in a month, month and a half anyway? I almost have to respect that.”

“I think it’s more about stuff from Romania. And I don’t want to talk to Bill right now.”

“Oh my god, tell me about it. The other day he lectured me on how much I should be withholding from each paycheck for my galleon market account or some other grandpa bullshit. So what’d you get up to in Romania? Can’t imagine it’s easy to get into trouble in a dragon sanctuary in the middle of nowhere, especially with a face like yours.”

“Thanks Ginny.”

George turned the corner next to Charlie and Ginny, a stack of boxed balanced precariously in the crook of his arm. “You know, Charlie, as much as we love trying to help you when you won’t tell us anything, we might actually be able to do something to help if you actually told us what you know.”

“Maybe some other time,” Charlie said, and turned to leave.

Ginny had always been fast. But she’d been lanky and awkward too, and whenever they played pickup Quidditch as kids her torso always seemed to be chasing after her arms and legs. It was easy to knock her off balance with a light check, and she invariably dropped the quaffle to keep the broom under control.

Whatever had been the case when they played pickup Quidditch as kids clearly was no longer the case. Ginny easily beat Charlie to the door and stopped him dead in his tracks with a palm in his chest. He realized that she’d grown taller than him too. Her baby fat was gone, sharpening the corners of her jaw, and a set of small scars crisscrossed her chin. 

“It may have escaped your notice, Charlie, but we’ve all seen some shit in this family, and we’ve all done some. We’re too old for secrets. If someone is legitimately out for you, we need to figure out who it is and fast, so we can smash these fuckers so hard they forget how to piss.”

Charlie’s resolve vanished.

“I had sex with Theo Nott!” he blurted. “More than once. A lot. Over the course of the last year and a half. I guess we were in a relationship.”

Ginny and George shared a look, and Charlie wished to God that time turners were real and that he had conveniently forgotten that he had one.

“So, no gambling debts?” George asked slowly.

Charlie shook his head.

“I’m guessing Mum doesn’t know?” Ginny said, fidgeting with a glove.

“Are you kidding me? She’s still speaking to me, isn’t she?”

“We’ll worry about Mum later,” George said, giving Ginny another look, and she gave him an almost imperceptible nod in return. “So those fucking ninjas are after you because… they think you’re in town to break up the Nott-Greengrass wedding?”

“That’s my best guest.”

“Are you?” Ginny asked, watching him carefully.

A fistful of rockets appeared in George’s hands, one nearly three feet long and tipped with a stylized red dragon’s head. “I’ve got fireworks and a reputation for using said fireworks for crashing serious events to maintain.”

“Please… don’t,” Charlie said, suddenly very worried that George would seize on the opportunity with or without his involvement or consent. “I’m not here to break up the wedding. It hadn’t even crossed my mind.”

“So, what happened in Romania then? We’re all glad you’re back, but why now then, if not to crash a wedding?” Ginny asked. George rested the fireworks against a counter, sighing in disappointment and patting the dragon headed firework wistfully. 

“I drank myself into oblivion when Theo wrote me that he was marrying Daphne. Wanted to keep seeing me under wraps, but I’m too old for that shit. I lost my edge on the job. Another handler got burned. Literally. She spent some time in a hospital ward, and I was suspended pending review.” Charlie’s eyes welled up, but it felt good to say everything out loud for the first time.

George let out a low whistle. “Ouch.”

“I can reapply for my old job after six months. Not guaranteed to get it, but my chances are good.”

“Will you?” Ginny asked. 

Charlie faltered. “I… don’t know,” he confessed. “A month ago I would have, without a doubt. But now,” Gabriel’s face flashed in his mind, “I’m tired. I’m just so tired. Of everything. I think now, if I went back, I’d start drinking again and get more and more bitter.”

Ginny squeezed his shoulder gently. “So what do you want to do now? About your two admirers?”

Charlie shrugged. “I wish I could just tell them I don’t want to have anything to do with Theo, or Daphne, or their purebloody wedding. But my timing on coming back to England is awfully convenient, and I doubt they’d just take me at my word.”

“Not to mention,” George interjected, crossing his arms indignantly, “that is quite possibly the lamest plan I have heard in my life. This is simply unacceptable. People jump you in an alley way and all you want to do is say, ‘pretty please, I’m not here for what you think i’m here for,’ and they’d say, ‘okay chum, our mistake, wanna be friends now?’ and you’d say ‘best friends forever!’ and you would all skip off into the sunset holding hands? Fuck that shit. This isn’t the Hufflepuff common room. I’ve got a plan, a real one.” There was a puff of smoke and the dragon firework reappeared in George’s hands, a sinister grin creeping across his face.

“George, put that away. You’re going to blow your face off. What’s left of it, anyway,” Ginny said, rolling her eyes.

George glared at her but the firework disappeared.

“George said it poorly, but there is a good point buried in there somewhere. Let’s say I’m this Tabitha Brown, assuming she’s the right pureblood. I’m not afraid to take a shot at you, and I think you’re here to break up my cousin’s wedding to a very wealthy family. I’d want to take you out of the picture entirely, before the event, just to be sure. It’d be sloppy to just let you float around. If I’m Tabitha, I’ve verified you haven’t skipped town, and now I’m regrouping for round two.”

“They only come after you the once?” George asked.

“Yeah, just once. I got a good look at them at the Quidditch game and I’m pretty sure I’d recognize them if I ever saw them again.”

“Another thing to consider is that even though it was just Tabitha and Renard Brown who attacked you, they are probably not the only muscle the Greengrasses have at their disposal. If you’ve marked them, and I’m old man Greengrass, I’d be sure to send someone else after you on the second attempt, someone you won’t recognize or see coming,” Ginny said, tapping her chin thoughtfully.

Charlie’s heart sank. He hadn’t considered that there might be more than just the two.

“But, if we can track one of the two, we can hold them and use them as a bargaining chip with the Greengrasses?” George suggested.

Ginny shook her head. “No good. These are the people they are willing to endanger in the first place. With a prize like the last Nott on the line, the Greengrasses won’t care if we throw a lesser cousin a holding tank for a while.”

“Whoa whoa, slow down!” Charlie said, throwing up his hands. “This is ridiculous! The war is over! You can’t seriously be floating kidnapping and ransom?”

“Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,” Ginny tutted, shaking her head slowly. “You may not have noticed, but the Weasleys are probably the most connected family in Britain. We can kidnap and ransom if we damn well please.”

“Can we just ask the Ministry for help then? Isn’t this what Magical Law Enforcement is for?”

“Oh my god, I can’t believe what I’m hearing right now!” George said, slapping his forehead. “You’re spending way too much fucking time with Percy! The wedding is in what, a few weeks? The ministry will take that long to realize its budget is overdue from last fucking year! So good luck requesting a inquiry around that mess.”

“To be fair, Charlie, if you’d have been honest about all this a month ago, we’d have more options on our plate. As it is…” Ginny spread her hands helplessly, “we’re stuck with kidnapping and ransom, or extortion and blackmail. Which we’re better at anyway.”

Charlie signed in resignation. “Fine. What now?”

George rubbed his hands together and cackled. “Something so sinister, so incredibly evil, so dark, so twisted, so unforgivable..”

“You mean we ask Bill to pull their address from their Gringotts vault records?” Ginny interrupted.

George nodded. “Yes. We ask Bill for help.”


	12. Chapter 12

Charlie exhaled slowly and rested his head against a post. It was cold, bitterly cold, a December 26th at the Burrow, and he hadn’t bothered to throw an extra sweater beneath his skroot coat before taking a mug of steaming cocoa to the deck for some air. 

Not that the night had gone poorly; he really had no right to complain, especially after hearing about his mother’s interrogation of Percy’s girlfriend the first time he’d dared bring her to a family event.

It helped that Gabriel had such good taste in gifts, good enough that Charlie didn’t have to explain himself. Bill eyed him suspiciously when his mother opened a new pair of enchantable knitting needles (or one-use wands, according to Gabriel), Arthur a “How Stuff Works,” encyclopedia, Victoire a self driving wooden horse, Percy a monogrammed leather messenger bag, Ron a Diagon Alley lunch discount card, and George a bottle of Ogre farts (“You’re on your own with George,” Gabriel told Charlie. “George isn’t my biggest fan and he’ll never forgive you if he ever finds out I helped pick out his gift”). 

Still, even in the best and most optimal circumstances, this was still a lot of Weasleys and a lot of significant others. 

“Mind if I crash your party?” Arthur asked, the sliding door screeching closed behind him.

Charlie closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He wasn’t sure if he was ready for this - no, he knew he wasn’t - but there wasn’t much choice.

He cocked his head as he realized he’d been telling himself he didn’t have a choice for a long time, but suddenly he wasn’t so sure that was the case. He could have fought harder for his job, but instead he’d chosen to drink. He could have stayed in Romania, but instead he’d chosen to drink. He could have talked to Theo, told him how he’d felt, but instead he’d chosen to drink. He had repeatedly chosen to roll over and do nothing but drink every time things got hard.

“Dad, I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “I know they’re just words, but I’m sorry.”

They stood silently, looking out over the dark, dead wheat fields. 

“Charlie, you don’t know how much your words mean to me. To you they’re just words, but to me, they’re a sign you’re still alive, that you’re still in there. That’s all I wanted.”

Charlie nodded, his mouth too dry to speak.

Arthur tightened his coat. “How long do you think it’ll take for Molly to notice that Percy and Audrey are wearing rings?”

Charlie turned his head so sharply a joint in his neck popped, his mouth open. “You’re kidding?”

“You think that’s a wise joke to make?” Arthur asked, blowing hot air on his fingers.

“Probably not. Never stopped any of us before.”

“True. Ready to come back inside?”

“No. But I will.”

Arthur smiled and clapped Charlie on the shoulder, then pulled the sliding door open and motioned for Charlie to follow him inside. 

It took a moment for Charlie’s face to thaw enough that he felt like he’d be able to move it again. They’d come in just as Molly was slicing her famous pumpkin pie, perfect timing in Charlie’s opinion. Arthur tiptoed behind her and flipped open the coffee pot to start another batch.

“Better make that decaf!” Ginny shouted. “Grandpa Bill here will get an upset stomach if he has caffeine after noon!”

Bill rolled his eyes and took a pair of plates and began passing them down the line of Weasleys. 

“I’ve got some information for you,” Bill said quietly, pressing a plate into Charlie’s hand. “We’ll talk later.”

Charlie nodded. He glanced around at the crowded kitchen. It would have to be much later until enough Weasleys cleared out for him to talk to Bill privately. Then again, Bill probably already told at least three other people. He never could keep a damn secret. 

He took a coffee from Arthur and brought his pie to a corner. It was delicious, but Molly’s baking always was. 

“Hey, Captain,” Angelina said, appearing at his elbow with her own plate and mug.

“Hey, Angelina. Gotten used to this whole tangled mess yet?” he asked, gesturing with a fork at the tightly packed kitchen. Harry and Ron had already finished their first serving and looped around to the back of the line for seconds.

She pursed her lips. “No. have you?”

“Nope.” He took another bite. “So, I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I don’t actually know what you do for a living.”

“I work part time for George,” Angelina said, mashing her pie and whipped cream into a pale orange mush.

“Oh! That’s… nice,” Charlie lied, taken aback. He had always assumed she would do something else, anything really. “How is that?”

Angelina snorted. “Don’t be stupid. You’re thick as Ron sometimes. No. I work for an employment agency specializing in placing liberated house elves.”

Charlie breathed a sigh of relief. “Sounds interesting. What’s it called?”

“SPEWFORTHE.”

“Hngh,” Charlie said, choking on pie crust. “Spewforth?”

“No, you’re saying it wrong. SPEWFORTHE.”

“Sounds more like puking the way you say it.”

“Yeah, well, what can you do,” she said, shrugging helplessly. “It’s an acronym. Society for the Protection of Elvish Welfare, Finding Opportunities for Responsible and Talented House Elves.”

“Ah. Bit of a mouthful.”

“Hence the acronym. Don’t look at me like that, I didn’t come up with it. You think that one’s a mouthful, ask Percy the name of the committee he’s chairing right now. Or don’t. I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Everyone! I have an announcement to make!” George said as he jumped up and balanced on a barstool, his magically amplified voice cutting over the sound of conversation and clinking silverware. “I have something that I’m very proud to introduce, something that’s been in the works for a very long time, and I couldn’t have made this dream come true without each and every one of you, especially you, Ron.” 

Hermione sighed and checked her watch.

“I’m afraid, so very afraid,” Charlie said out of the corner of his mouth.

Angelina patted his shoulder. “It’ll be okay.”

“Did he put a test product in the pie?”

George waggled his fingers and hopped down from the chair. “I will be back momentarily for the unveiling. Please contain your fervor, the first run is large enough that everyone here can reserve one for a mere twenty four galleons and ninety nine knuts.”

“Whatever it is, that’s too much,” Charlie muttered. Angelina snickered.

Somehow George must have heard him, and fixed him with an irritated glare that Charlie knew spelled trouble. Sometime in the next thirty six hours, he would likely be on the wrong end of a dungbomb. 

“If you would, please, a drumroll!” George shouted, and disapparated with a crack.

“Should I leave now?” Charlie asked. 

“Maybe. Probably. Definitely.” Angelina said.

There was another loud bang and George apparated back onto the barstool, a shiny purple box in his hands.

“I give you, for the first time ever, the Fartmaster Two th…”

“Charlie!” a silver owl patronus shrieked over George’s announcement as it swept through the kitchen window. “I need help at my shop! Now!”

Without thinking, Charlie ripped his wand out of its sheath from inside his coat.

“What the fuck is Gabriel fucking Ollivander…” was the last thing Charlie heard from the Burrow before he apparated to Diagon Alley.


	13. Chapter 13

Charlie winced when he landed, pain stabbing through his knees. His first reaction was horror that he’d splinched himself, but looking down at the street he noticed the broken glass. He was bleeding, but he’d live.

Ollivander’s frosted glass storefront was shattered, the door blown clean off its hinges and tossed into a snowdrift as an afterthought. The shop was dark, but with the dim blue light of the streetlamps refracting off the snow he could just see high piles of carelessly upended boxes and displays.

“Shit,” he said and stepped inside, his boots crunching loudly on the glass shards. 

He saw a flash out of the corner of his eye and threw himself to the ground on instinct, feeling the heat of the curse as it burned through the air where his stomach had been a second earlier.

“He’s back out front!”

Charlie recognized the reedy voice instantly. The same man who petrified him in an alley and let him bleed alone and cold in the night until dawn finally negated the curse. There was only one trick he could think of in order to confirm his attacker’s identity.

“Renard!” Charlie shouted.

“He’s made us!” 

Charlie grinned and rolled to avoid a second curse which slapped into the ancient stone floor, kicking up a spray of flames. He didn’t recognize the curse, but it didn’t take a NEWT in Defense Against the Dark Arts to see it was going to hurt if he got hit. 

Renard advanced down an aisle between two towering shelves and fired another curse. Charlie managed to knock that one aside and returned a volley of stupefy.

Charlie’s curse missed Renard but slammed into the shelf crammed with wand boxes by his head, erupting in a kaleidoscope of colorful lights and an angry horn sound. Renard yelped and wheeled away away from the exploding wands.

The brief respite from Renard’s attacks gave Charlie a precious window of opportunity. He scrambled back to his feet, tiny pieces of glass falling out of the folds of his coat.

“Ventus!” he screamed, and a gust of rushing wind roared from his wand, spiraling and slinging shards of glass and loose boxes and stray wands down the aisle at Renard. 

Renard ducked and tried to raise his wand for a shield but Charlie’s blast of wind and glass caught him and knocked him back into the dark with a shriek.

Before Charlie could pursue Renard into the back of the shop a yellow blast drove through a skroot plate under his arm and spun him around. He tripped over an overturned stool and fell heavily to the floor. He grabbed the leg of a nearby table and pulled it down to put a barrier between him and wherever the caster was hiding. Tabitha had to be prowling around somewhere. Charlie heard Renard scrambling out of the aisle ahead of him and he swore quietly. If Tabitha hadn’t shown up just when she had he could have overwhelmed her brother and petrified him.

Charlie yelped in surprise as suddenly the table levitated off the floor and one of the legs knocked against his eyebrow. He barely had enough time to throw up a shield spell, another yellow blast splashing against his glowing blue shield.

“Finite incantatum!” Tabitha yelled, and his shield winked out of existence, but so did the levitation spell holding the table, and it crashed back to the ground around him, the heavy scrolled leg narrowly missing the back of his head on the way down. 

“Shit this is bad,” Charlie muttered. He was no dueler and he knew it. He doubted Tabitha and Renard were either, but right now they had both a numerical and a positional advantage. It was only a matter of time before they smoked him out.

Where was Gabriel? Had he already gotten clear? Or was he lying in a corner, petrified and bleeding?

Another curse hit the table and a Charlie felt a gust of heat. 

“What’s wrong with you? You’re going to light up the whole damn place if you keep that up!” Tabitha snarled. Charlie pinpointed her voice to somewhere on the narrow metal walkway which accessed the highest row of shelves. She would have a good angle to shoot down at him him but her footing would be precarious. 

Suddenly the shop went dark. It had been dim before, lit only by the glow of the streetlamp and bright snow, but now it was completely black.

“Finite incantatum!” Renard yelled again, but the darkness didn’t even flicker.

Charlie seized the opportunity and crawled toward the wall opposite Tabitha, the table screeching on the floor as he pushed away from it. Renard tried a counterspell again to no avail and Charlie felt his knuckles knock into the wall.

“It’s not working, Tabitha!” Renard whined. Charlie froze. Renard was very close by.

As quickly and as quietly as he could Charlie lifted himself to his feet and grabbed hold of a shelf and began to climb, desperately hoping the shelf would bear his weight. It creaked but held. He climbed three shelves and felt cold iron when he reached for his next handhold. He’d reached the bottom grate of the walkway. 

His heart dropped into his stomach when his foot brushed against wand boxes, upending them with a clatter. Charlie hoisted himself onto the walkway while Renard blindly fired off a flurry of curses and stumbled in the dark beneath him.

“Lumos maxima!”

Charlie’s eyes watered as the blinding light banished the darkness spell. Tabitha stood on the opposite side of the walkway with her wand stretched overhead.

“Weasley!” she spat, lowering her wand at him.

“Weasley?” Renard said, looking up at him in surprise, barely ten feet away from him behind Gabriel’s register.

“Charlie!” Gabriel yelled, bursting out of a small door at the back of the shop, a wand in each hand, and shot a rapid pair of curses at Tabitha. She jumped off the walkway and tumbled out of sight down an aisle, and Gabriel vanished from sight and the sound of curses filled the air.

Charlie and Renard locked eyes; Renard’s arm raised to curse Charlie and Charlie leaped down at him.

There were not many situations in Charlie’s life where his size had been an advantage. It had made him an easy bludger target and a lousy dueler. Clothes that fit were scarce, and so were beds.

All of the annoyance and irritation he’d experienced in his life had been worth it for this one glorious moment. He knocked aside Renard’s wand as he fell and the spell went wide. Charlie’s shoulder connected with Renard’s collarbone and they fell in a heap, Renard gasping for breath as Charlie’s bulk slammed the air out of his lungs. He swung a leg over Renard’s stomach and knelt over him, and punched him hard, in the nose and then in the chin. Renard moaned and his head rolled back.

Charlie took Renard’s wand and snapped it in two.

“See how you like it,” he growled, and dropped the broken wand on Renard’s chest. 

Someone shrieked in the next aisle and he swore under his breath. Charlie clambered to his feet and turned the corner. 

Tabitha must have winged Gabriel’s shoulder; his right arm was hanging limp at this side and he was casting with only his left now. Tabitha launched another yellow blast and Gabriel threw himself to the right and Charlie to the left.

Glass globes knocked loose by the fighting rolled off the shelf and Charlie caught one reflexively. Gabriel fired a salvo and Tabitha deftly parried each spell. She was fast. 

Charlie decided a different tactic was needed. He waited for Gabriel’s next counterattack to hold Tabitha’s attention. A second later Gabriel fired a pair of bright blue hexes. Tabitha deflected the first and hopped to the side to avoid the second, throwing out her arm to keep her balance. 

It was a perfect opening. Charlie switched the glass globe to his throwing hand. It was just wide enough to palm comfortably and probably weighed a solid five pounds. He whipped it quaffle style at her torso.

The extended firefight in dim light spilling in from the street had sensitized them all to the bright flashes of curses and jinxes. Charlie was certain Tabitha didn’t even see the dark globe coming. His aim was good and the globe slammed solidly into her stomach with a dull thud, her eyes widening as she gasped from the shock of the heavy impact. 

She fell hard, arms windmilling and flailing to try to catch her fall. She wheezed loudly as she struggled to breathe. Somehow she had just enough presence of mind to summon a cloud of darkness for cover.

Gabriel cast another set of hexes into the dark and followed them up with lumos to banish it. When the light reappeared they saw Tabitha and Renard in the street, leaning into each other as they struggled to stand. Tabitha raised an arm weakly and they vanished with a loud crack. 

Charlie caught Gabriel as he collapsed from the exertion, cradling him gently and guiding him onto the floor.

“It’s okay, Gabriel,” he whispered, setting Gabriel’s head on his chest and squeezing his shaking hand, “it’s just an energy dump. Happened all the time on the reservation. Just breathe. It’ll clear up in a few minutes.”

Charlie wasn’t sure how long he sat there amidst the debris, rocking Gabriel in his arms, whispering reasurances into his ear, but it felt like forever before Gabriel’s breathing slowed and his hand tremor dissipated. 

Finally Gabriel lifted his chin slightly to look up at Charlie, his metal framed glasses all askew. 

“I’m so cold,” he murmured into Charlie’s chest.

“No, no, no, stay with me!” Charlie said, his voice catching as his heart leapt into his throat, squeezing Gabriel tighter.

“No you fucking…. I mean, it’s December and all the windows in my shop are blown,” he said, a faint smile tugging his lips.

“Oh! Right,” Charlie said, feeling very foolish, realizing Gabriel was only wearing a light pair of striped pajamas. Careful to disturb him as little as possible, Charlie fished out his wand and pointed it at the windows.

“Reparo,” he said, and lazily shards of glass drifted through the air and rearranged themselves into their rightful places. There were still a few small gaps, and crack lines where the glass shattered, but it was mostly whole again. He slipped the wand back into its holster.

“That wand suits you.”

“I’m just happy I didn’t splinch myself,” Charlie admitted.

“Albatross feather cores, adept for transportation magic and manipulating air and objects. Seems like your thing.”

“I guess so,” Charlie said.

They sat quietly in the dark, Charlie still supporting Gabriel against him with one arm, saying nothing. 

“Oh my god, I’m sorry,” Charlie said, noticing his hand had fallen into the crook of Gabriel’s hip. He pulled it away.

“No, that’s okay, I mean really okay, I mean put that back! I mean, if you want to.”

Charlie bit his lip, his own hand shaking as he traced the curve of Gabriel’s hip with his thumb.

“We could, go upstairs, if you wanted to,” Gabriel said, shifting so his leg draped over Charlie’s.

“I think I would like that,” Charlie said hoarsely. He swallowed hard as Gabriel hooked a hand onto his belt, fingertips pressing lightly onto his stomach.

“I bet you could, you know, throw a guy like me over your shoulder if you wanted.”

“I bet I could,” he said, his hand pressing into the small of Gabriel’s back.

“One condition.” 

Charlie froze, squeezing his eyes closed. Of course there was a condition. Theo had just one condition too.

“If you see anything labelled wand oil, that is for actual wands. Don’t put it on your body, you could die.”

Charlie smiled. “I won’t.”


	14. Chapter 14

Charlie woke up with his ear pressed into his elbow and his forehead wedged against a set of leather bound books. He was fairly certain the embossed title would leave a mark on his face, but he didn’t have the heart to extricate himself from the snoring tangle of Gabriel’s limbs that dominated the sizeable bed crammed into Gabriel’s attic apartment.

The sun had risen enough to cast a cool morning light through a crooked window overlooking Diagon alley. It was bright enough for him to read the titles on the shelf. “Woods for Woads,” “Whittling a Wand,” “Casting with Cantankerous Cores.” All riveting stuff. Just some light bedtime reading. 

Finally his leg grew alarmingly numb from being pinned under Gabriel’s bony hip, and Charlie twisted to free himself. Gabriel grunted, rolled over, and continued snoring. Charlie sat up and rubbed his eyes. He was damn tired, but he was okay with that. At least he could remember why he was tired for once.

“Bolting?”

Charlie looked over his shoulder. Gabriel was looking up at him with one eye open, his face in a small pile of drool.

“No, just stretching a bit,” he said, patting Gabriel’s knee.

“I figured. People were shorter when they built this apartment,” Gabriel said. Charlie raised an eyebrow. “Okay, maybe they were about my height. This room is actually pretty big without all the bookshelves, but what’s the point of a big empty room with no books in it?”

“Good point.”

Gabriel’s eyes closed again and he began to snore. He snorted loudly and snapped awake again.

“Gabriel, I’m sorry,” Charlie said.

Gabriel sat up with a knowing smile. “I get it,” he said. “This is the part where you say, ‘oh, I had a real great time, but I will never make eye contact again,’ right? Because Gabriel Ollivander is too nice for blackmail?”

“No, I mean, about your shop,” Charlie said quickly. “I think I’m the reason those goons showed up last night.”

Gabriel gave a sigh of relief. “Oh, no, that’s okay. I was worried you were going to, well you know.”

Charlie nodded. He did know.

“So why do you think you’re the reason they broke into my place?” Gabriel said, quickly changing the subject.

“It’s complicated… I think they think I’m here to break up the Nott-Greengrass wedding. They’ve come after me before and now I think they’re targeting people I care about.”

Gabriel frowned. “Why would you be here to break up the Nott-Greengrass wedding?”

“Well,” Charlie began, scratching his chin nervously, “I uh, well me and Theo, well…”

“It’s okay. I get it.” Gabriel said, squeezing Charlie’s hand.

“Thank you. So, those two goons are Tabitha and Renard Brown. They’re… lesser Greengrass cousins. I think they’re worried I’ll do something rash and Daphne Greengrass will get jilted.”

“Seems reasonable,” Gabriel said. “One problem with your theory, though.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t think they were after me at all. I was in the kitchen last night and I heard a noise in my workshop. And I went to investigate and found them going through my books. If they were here just to rough me up I doubt they’d take a detour to look at my reading collection. Unless they happen to be wandlore enthusiasts. Or, more likely, they’re in the employ of that scoundrel Gregorovitch!”

“I’m pretty sure they’re not working for Gregorovitch. Besides, the glass was shattered. If they were sneaking in to rob you, wouldn’t they go through quietly?”

“They did. The storefront window got shot out during the fight before you showed up.”

Charlie scowled. He thought he’d had a pretty good working theory, but if Tabitha and Renard were just there to rob Gabriel, that wouldn’t be consistent with what he’d worked out with George and Ginny.

“Maybe they’re double dipping?” Charlie offered. “Figured while they were breaking and entering to rough you up they should try to find something of value?”

Gabriel yawned. “Could be. The word on the alley here lately is that the Greengrasses are as broke as purebloods come, and their last assets are two pureblood daughters. Which is nothing to sneeze at, if you look at the _ Sacred Nineteen _ .”

Charlie felt the blood drain from his face. “Oh my god, you’re in the  _ Sacred Nineteen _ !”

“And? You are too.”

“You don’t have any brothers? Just you?”

Gabriel shrugged. “Sorry. Just me.”

“So you’re the only male Ollivander heir?”

“Technically.”

Charlie covered his face with his hands. “So was… is… Theo. I can’t believe I did this again.”

“Did what? So you have a type. Big deal.”

Charlie smiled weakly. “I’m sure you’ll be fine doing this for now, but sooner or later your father will get impatient and you’ll start paging through the  _ Sacred Nineteen _ for eligible young witches, so he can find someone for you to carry on the family name and all that bullshit. Then you’ll write me a letter telling me you want to keep doing this, but under the table and only when the wife is out with friends.” It came out harder than he meant it to, but it didn’t really matter at this point.

Gabriel chuckled and leaned forward. “Can I tell you a secret?”

Charlie’s mouth twitched but he didn’t answer.

“Fine, I can obliviate you if needs be. If you look at the Ollivander family tree, there is a curious lack of women.”

“So?”

“So, it’s theoretically a fifty fifty shot to have a boy or a girl, but there has never been an Ollivander daughter for like, a thousand generations. Well, maybe not a thousand, but at least twenty seven.”

“What makes you think it’s fifty fifty? Purebloods only seem to have boys.”

“It’s genetic… you know what, don’t worry about it. My point is, with Ollivander’s, it’s guaranteed to be a boy,” Gabriel said in a conspiratorial whisper.

“Gabriel, I don’t want to hear about weird sex magic.”

Gabriel rubbed his forehead. “Okay, I’ll just put it out there. No one ever gets sorted into Gryffindor for reading between the lines. There is a very old tradition in the Ollivander family line of adopting down and out muggleborn boys.”

“Wait, what? You’re not Garrick Ollivander’s son?”

“Oh, I’m his son all right. And I have been ever since he pulled me out of the foster care system when I was eight,” Gabriel said, beaming. 

“Didn’t anyone notice that all of the sudden Garrick had an eight year old?”

Gabriel rolled his eyes. “Such an easy lie. Oh, he’s the product of an old tryst with a French woman, and he’s been with his mother on the continent. As if anyone could or would have a casual tryst with my father.”

“So someday you’ll…”

“Pull some muggleborn out of foster care or an orphanage or what have you, and groom him to be the next master of Ollivander’s. And no one will question it because no one would dare question the Ollivander’s. We are  _ the _ wizarding family, you know.”

“Well, that’s ironic.”

“Isn’t it though?” Gabriel mused, sitting back and resting his head on the windowsill. “You, on the other hand…”

“Me?”

“Have any of your brothers married purebloods, or are you the last hope for a pureblood Weasley scion?”

Charlie snorted. “You would think that’s what my mother’s after, the way she hounds me. Lucky for me, my brother Bill already has a daughter for her to fawn over. Takes some of the heat off me. But I’m sure my mother fantasizes about Weasleys running the wizarding world.”

“We could call it the Red Scare!” Gabriel laughed, then his face fell as Charlie stared at him blankly. “Red scare? Get it? No? Okay, don’t worry about it. Anyway, I’m starving. I’m going to go shower, then meet you in the kitchen?” 

“Sounds good,” Charlie said, and Gabriel hopped out of bed and padded into the adjoining bathroom. Charlie reached over the side of the bed to sift through the pile of clothes until he found his pants and undershirt. He pulled them on and walked down the impossibly tight staircase to the kitchenette. Whoever built Ollivander’s had clearly shoehorned in the living quarters as an afterthought. The entirety of Gabriel’s apartment could fit into the living room of the Burrow.

He winced as he knocked his shoulder into a kitchen cabinet jutting out into the entryway, and froze in panic to see Garrick Ollivander with a cup of tea and a folded Daily Prophet balanced on his knee. 

“I, uh, I’m here to check on your Floo hookup?” Charlie stuttered. “I understand you’ve been having issues, can you point me to the fireplace?”

Garrick raised an eyebrow and turned the page of the Prophet. “Really? And you thought you would first look in my son’s bedroom? Tell me, what kind of issue are you here to… fix?”

“Um,” Charlie said, scratching his neck. “Floo… connectivity?”

“Hm. And is it customary for Floo techs to work barefoot in a fireplace?”

“Um.”

“Indeed,” Garrick said, rolling the Prophet closed and pointing it at the stool opposite him at the tiny table. “Sit, Mr. Weasley.”

Charlie quickly sat. 

“Do you like magic, Mr. Weasley?”

Charlie swallowed loudly. “Yes sir.”

“And your right hand? I imagine that is your wand hand, yes? Do you like your right hand?”

“Yes sir,” Charlie said, growing increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation.

“I trust you understand then, that should you do anything to harm my darling Gabriel, that you will be forced to rely on a Gregorovitch wand, and you will not only be as adept with magic as a camel, but you will almost certainly lose your right hand when a simple spell goes horribly awry, which it inevitably will.”

Charlie covered up his laugh with a cough, “I understand, sir.”

“Good. I’m glad we understand each other. Tea?”

“Please,” he said. He didn’t want tea at all, but he felt it would be rude to say so. He needed a strong cup of coffee.

Garrick reached over to the two-burner stove and took the teapot off the back and poured a small cup of tea for Charlie. 

Just then, Gabriel bounded down the stairs and greeted Garrick with a hug and a kiss on the top of his white head.

“Morning, father!” Gabriel said brightly, pulling three plates out of a cupboard and bringing them and a loaf of bread to the table.

“Good morning, dear Gabriel. I trust you had a pleasant evening? Despite… issues with the Floo network?”

Gabriel frowned and plopped down on a stool. The kitchenette was so small Charlie’s knees were knocking into both Gabriel and Garrick. 

“Issues with the Floo? No, everything’s fine. Aside from the thugs who broke in last night to rough me up to mess with Charlie.”

Charlie choked and feigned a deep interest in the china pattern as he felt Garrick’s heavy glare.

“Or that’s what Charlie thinks anyway, but I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure they were here to rob the place.”

“Indeed? Garrick said. “And why would they dare try to rob us?”

“We’re not sure yet,” Gabriel said, absentmindedly buttering a slice of bread.

“My brother has some information for me. About Tabitha and Renard Brown. The two who broke in,” Charlie volunteered in a small voice. He noticed Garrick had a remarkable talent for staring without blinking.

“For your sake, Mr. Weasley, I hope so,” Garrick said.

“What kind of information?” Gabriel asked.

Charlie shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably whatever he could pull about them from their Gringotts accounts.”

Garrick set the Prophet on the table. “Does your brother make a habit of going unbidden into Gringott’s vaults?”

“I, uh, know he would never go into yours.”

“See that he does not.”

A silver lemur patronus burst through the middle of the table and wheeled on Charlie, and all three jumped in surprise, knocking silverware to the floor with a clatter.

“If you think Gabriel fucking Ollivander is the only one who knows this trick, you’re wrong fatty,” the lemur shouted angrily in George’s voice. “Anyway, Bill told me to tell you that he left a note with Ron for you. And here’s a taste of what you missed last night, you absconding asshole!” With that, the lemur turned, raised its rump, and blared a long, wet, whistling fart, and vanished.


	15. Chapter 15

“So, how’s business?” Gabriel asked, bending close to a shelf and squinting to read small gold lettering on a bright green box.

Ron coughed nervously and glanced at Charlie. “Nothing personal, Ollivander, but George said I’m not supposed to talk to you about business. Well, he specifically told me not to speak to you at all or look at you, but that seems a little extreme.”

“I see. Any other banned topics?”

“He told me not to fart around you,” Ron added, blushing. “He said he would consider that giving away trade secrets and would fire me and sue me. Though I don’t think he could actually sue me, considering I’m married to his lawyer.”

Gabriel nodded gravely. “Well then, for all our sakes, I hope you do not feel the need to fart around me.”

“How long has she been gone now?” Charlie interrupted. “I can’t read your damned clock.” It had seven hands, and it was impossible for Charlie to decipher them all.

“Ah. On Tuesday the red hand is for the hour, and the purple is for minutes. So… two hours now?”

“I had been wondering about the clock, now that you mention it,” Gabriel said.

“George doesn’t want customers to know how long they’ve been in, so they’re more likely to stay longer and buy more product,” Ron explained. “Which colored hands tell the accurate time depends on the day of the week. So he and I can tell what time it is. And now you, but, only on Tuesdays. Shit,” Ron’s face fell. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell George I told you that.”

“Your secret’s safe with me.”

“Two hours?” Charlie said in exasperation. “Is she safe?”

Ron waved a hand flippantly and leaned back against the counter. “Relax. She’s got Harry’s invisibility cloak. And it’s not like spying on a random house is anywhere near as dangerous as, I don’t know, breaking into the Department of Mysteries to head off a bunch of Death Eaters?”

“Wait, Harry has an invisibility cloak? Why didn’t I know about this?” Charlie could think of a number of situations over the past few months where something like an invisibility cloak would have come in handy.

“To be fair, people get a little weird if they find out you have access to an invisibility cloak. It’s like everyone thinks there’s nothing better to do than lurk in someone’s closet and make heavy breathing noises.”

“Have you done that?” Charlie asked.

“To George, once,” Ron confessed. “It was worth it to see the panicked look on his face, but it’s too time consuming of a prank to make a habit of doing.”

There was a loud bang of apparition, but no one appeared. 

“Gee, Charlie, you sure look stupid when you’re surprised,” Ginny said, her face and then her torso appearing as she shrugged off the gauzy purple cloak. She stamped her shiny boots on the floor to shake off the snow. “And you must be Gabriel Ollivander,” she said, stepping over to him and giving his hand a vigorous shake, smirking at Charlie. “I hear you’re the one who’s been taming my brother’s dragon.”

“Oh God,” Charlie blurted.

“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” Gabriel stammered.

“Oh sweetie, I think you do. But I’ll let it slide.”

“So? What’d you find?” Charlie asked.

Ginny glared at him. “What, no ‘thank you Ginny for sitting in the cold in the middle of nowhere for hours?’ I’ll remember your gratitude the next time you ask me for a favor.”

“I didn’t ask you to do anything. You were already gone when I got here.”

“Still. All the same, you would have asked me, because I’m the only one around here who gets shit done,” she said haughtily. 

Charlie crossed his arms. “What’d you find?”

“Fine, fine. I went to the address Bill pulled, had to fly through some right nasty weather to get there too. Very rural and remote. Closest neighbors are a quarter mile off.”

“That’s good for us,” Ron noted.

“Why is that good for us?” Gabriel asked.

“Because, Ollivander, when we break in later, the neighbors are too far off to hear glass breaking,” Ginny said matter of factly. “In any case, it’s a fucking shack. Maybe a couple of bedrooms, but it makes the Burrow look like a country manor. I watched and saw two people, man and woman, matching the description you gave Ron, leave, ward the door, and apparate away. Waited another half hour, to make sure they didn’t just step out for a quick errand, and they haven’t been back.”

“If they warded the door, they’re probably out for a while.”

Ginny nodded. “Also means they’ve got something worth protecting. Or something they think is worth protecting.”

“Do you think the ward will be a problem?” Charlie asked.

“No,” Ginny said. She took off her gloves and approached the fire to warm her hands.  “I wasn’t close enough to hear the exact incantation, but it was a short one. Probably just something to either scare away intruders or alert if someone shows up. Nothing a simple counterspell can’t befuddle.”

“Well, what’s the plan?” Ron asked, pulling on a heavy coat.

Ginny rolled her eyes. “We go in. We find what we’re looking for. We leave. Any more stupid questions?”

“I figured that much. But do you have any idea what we’re looking for? No?” Ron and Ginny looked at Gabriel expectantly.

“I really haven’t had a chance to look over my inventory, so I don’t exactly know what they took. Hopefully I’ll recognize whatever it is when I see it.”

“Great. Okay everyone, keep your eyes peeled for wands or trivia books. Everybody ready?”

Charlie fastened his skroot plate coat tight around him and nodded.

Ginny slipped her gloves back on and moved to the center of the group. “All right, I’m going to apparate us about a hundred feet behind the house. Give me some space while I take care of the ward, and then we’ll go in.” 

Charlie swallowed and stepped forward between Ron and Gabriel to touch Ginny’s shoulder. She nodded and then Charlie’s stomach dropped as she apparated them away.

They landed in an empty field blanketed in snow, glowing with moonlight. Charlie gasped as the cold wintry air shocked his lungs, and took a few deep breaths to adjust. Gabriel touched his arm and pointed; Ginny was already halfway to the house, running with her dark green quidditch coat kicking up behind her. Charlie sighed. She was enjoying this far too much.

Charlie, Gabriel, and Ron followed at a jog, pausing as she crouched beneath a window and slowly peeked over the sill, then stood and moved on. A moment later Charlie reached the window and he glanced inside himself, but all he could see was shadow. 

One thing he could see up close was that Ginny was right by calling it a fucking shack. Whatever paint it once had had long since peeled away, and the wooden plank siding was split and warped, the shadows of long rusted nails in the gaps. Charlie had to duck his head to avoid a dangling gutter. 

They reached the front corner of the dilapidated house and Ginny motioned for them to wait. She crept up the uneven stairs to the narrow porch and knelt in front of the door. 

Ginny glared at the doorknob and then stood to look into the small window next to the door, framing her face with her hands to block out the moonlight. She nodded, slipped her wand back inside her coat, and smashed the window with her elbow.

“What the fuck, Ginny!” Charlie exclaimed, rising from his crouch and feeling very foolish for their stealth antics. Ron gave a long suffering sigh. “I thought you said this place was warded.”

“Correction: I said the  _ door  _ was warded,” she explained, reaching her arm through the broken window. She narrowed her eyes in concentration as she fumbled around, and then she pushed the door open from the inside. “Have you ever heard of a ward that goes off when people leave? And have you met any wizards who anticipate someone might break in without magic?”

“Yes,” Charlie lied.

“Won’t they know we were here?” Gabriel asked, chewing on his lips.

Ron snorted. “Even if she hadn’t busted the window, the footprints in the snow would be a dead giveaway.”

“Besides,” Ginny added, “we want them to know we were here. We want them to know we’re not afraid to do to them what they did to you. Make them think twice from now on. Fair enough?”

Gabriel nodded. 

“All right then. Gentlemen? After you.”

Ron led the way and lit up the front room with a spell. The inside of the Brown household didn’t look much better than the outside. A pair of worn recliners crowded close to a crumbling fireplace, ash spilling out onto the cracked floorboards. Each step they took creaked loudly. Charlie couldn’t shake the feeling that his foot was going to crash through a soft spot in the floor. 

“Pretty bleak, eh?” Ron said, nudging a coffee table with a brick standing in for a missing leg.

“Well, we can pretty much count on them not hiding anything in the living room,” Charlie said, eager to sweep the house as quickly as possible.

There was a loud crash and Charlie barely had enough time to duck flying ceramic shards.  
“Ginny,” he growled, climbing to his feet and wiping dirt off his knees. “What. The. FUCK!”

Ginny gave him a smug grin, lazily whirling a bludger bat in her hand. She sifted through the remains of a vase with her foot. “Well, nothing in there. I hope those weren’t someone’s ashes.”

“Ginny, this is serious,” Charlie said.

“Ginny, this is serious,” Ginny repeated in an annoying, high pitched voice.

“Oh my god, you think those might be ashes?” Gabriel said, his eyes spread wide with alarm. He briskly dusted off his peacoat. “OH my god, that is so… these could be ashes on me!”

“Relax, Ollivander, it was a potted plant,” she said.

“You don’t think they might be putting my things in a potted plant, do you? With dirt?”

Ginny looked at Charlie and cocked an eyebrow.

“We’re not just here to find your action figures, Ollivander. I’m here looking for a good time. It’s my payment for services rendered, i.e. sitting in a fucking snowdrift freezing my ass off waiting for Tweedledee and Tweedledum to leave the next and go to market, so I could come get you from your place by the fire. So now I’m here to find a good time. Oh look,” she said, pausing by a painted plate hanging from a rusted nail. She raised the bat and smashed the butt into the plate, splitting it into pieces, “I think I found it..”

“Ginny, so help me god, I will sit on your head,” Charlie said, balling his fists.

“Like you could catch me. I’d be worried if you could, but you’ve packed on the pounds lately.” She glanced at Gabriel and shrugged. “Sorry, he’s really past his prime.”

“Well, I think he’s fine. More than fine. Quite fine,” Gabriel said quickly.

“Ew. Gross. He’s my brother for god’s sake.”

“Speaking of, where the hell did Ron run off to?” Charlie asked. He leaned around a dividing wall and cast his lumos over the kitchen. Charlie wrinkled his nose at the bitter smell.

Every available surface was crammed with dirty pots and pans. 

“Geez Charlie, now is not the time for a snack,” Ron said, stepping out of the hallway with a massive book tucked under his arm.

Charlie sighed and rolled his eyes.

“This yours, Ollivander?” Ron asked, hefting the book onto the back of the recliner and holding his wand light close so Gabriel could see it. “I’m assuming so, if it’s a book. These don’t seem like the reading types.”

“It is,” Gabriel said, squinting. He flipped the book open and flicked through the pages with his thumb. “How did you find it so fast?”

Ron shrugged with a satisfied smirk. “I have like, a million siblings. I know how to hide stuff.”

“Oh please. The only interesting thing you ever hid inside your mattress was that stack of love letters you wrote for Hermione after your sixth year,” Ginny drawled as she stepped behind Gabriel and peered over his shoulder.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ron stammered.

“I think you do, Ron. It’s good you never gave them to her, though. I think she’d have found the spelling a big turnoff. Ollivander, what is this gibberish?”

“It’s not gibberish! It’s Middle English. This is a book of fourteenth century poetry. And they probably won’t be able to read it, unless they have a really old portrait lying around. I’m surprised they took this one book, to be honest. They must not have had time to look at it before I interrupted them. Hey!” His mouth fell open, aghast. “They dog-eared a page! Who fucking does that? This book has been around for centuries! You don’t just fold the corner of a page! You use a pH balanced bookmark, everybody fucking knows that!”

Ginny stepped back from Gabriel during his tirade, bumping into Charlie’s elbow. “He’s intense,” she whispered.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Gross.”

Charlie smiled. “What, suddenly not so wordly and tough? Which page did they mark?”

Gabriel held up a finger to cut him off, his mouth moving silently as his eyes scanned the page. Suddenly he stopped, straightened up, and gently closed the book. “This is getting ridiculous.”

“What is it?” Charlie asked.

Gabriel turned and sat on the arm of the recliner, which groaned ominously under his weight. 

“It’s a poem about the Bloodwand, one of the few descriptions,” he said, shaking his head. “But they won’t get anywhere with this.”

“Why not?”

“Supposing they actually find someone who can read Middle English, which will take a minute, this is only a fragment. The full, or the fullest version of the poem, in any case, is in the custody of the Department of Mysteries. It was in the possession of my grandfather but the Department decided it was considered Dark and Dangerous and seized it. My father spent years issuing requests trying to reclaim it, but they were all denied.”

“What’s in the original that the Department of Mysteries wanted confiscated?”

Gabriel ran a hand through his hair. “My grandfather’s copy was a work about some pretty Dark stuff, but it happened to have an excerpt about the Bloodwand. But it’s not written by the Bloodwand’s creator. It was written by a guy who knew a guy, so who can trust the veracity of the account? I’m not sure this book will be any more useful to us than it is to them.”

They fell silent. Charlie stumped his feet to shake out the numbness in his toes.

“Do they know that?” Ron asked quietly. Maybe it was the lighting, but Charlie noticed for the first time how extraordinarily like Arthur Ron looked. It was unnerving. “I mean, even if they don’t find something immediately useful in that text, they’re going to plan their next move based on what they find.”

“We also have a killer record breaking into the Department of Mysteries,” Ginny offered.

“Or,” Ron said quickly, holding up a hand to stop her inevitable scheming, “we could pull some strings and fast track a guest past request. Like adults. With connections. Which we are.”

 


	16. Chapter 16

“One egg or two, dear?” Molly asked as Charlie fell into a chair across from his father.

“One is fine Mum, thanks,” he mumbled, wiping his eyes blearily. When he was younger he had always wondered how his mother managed to be so cheerful so early, but he hadn’t made the connection with her habit of going to bed at eight every night.

“How was work?” Arthur asked.

Charlie shrugged, flipped a mug off a hook, and poured a cup from the thermos on the table. “It was fine. What can I say, I’m really good and standing around looking surly.”

“Are you sure you’re living up to your potential there? Does Rolf really not mind?” Molly asked.

Something in Charlie cracked. He didn’t know what exactly, or why at this moment. He was just so damn tired. He had made mistakes, bad mistakes, and he had come to terms with that. Okay enough not to keep lying about them.

“Mum, I got so drunk on the job that one of my coworkers nearly lost an arm to a Welsh Green.”

Molly and Arthur froze. It was as if time stopped. Molly stood with the skillet tipped at an angle over a plate, bits of scrambled egg hanging precariously over the rim. Arthur sat with his mug halfway to his mouth, the page of the Prophet half turned.

“Toast,” Molly said at last, through clenched teeth. She dumped the last chunks of egg onto the plate and opened a cabinet door. “That’s what you need, toast. With some strawberry jam. Freshly… jammed.”

“I was suspended without pay pending review,” Charlie continued, staring into his coffee. Could a witch or wizard predict the future by reading coffee grounds? Or did it have to be tea? “Then I drank more. I drank because I received a letter from my boyfriend, Theo Nott, telling me he was getting married, and oh, by the way, he’d like to continue seeing me on the side.”

Charlie stopped and sipped his coffee. He needed the banality of drinking coffee as a crutch to steele his nerves. There was no going back now. He had no choice but to finish his confession. The realization filled him with a sense of calm; he could only go forward.

“I wasn’t all right with Theo’s proposition. I never in a million years would have guessed he would put me in that kind of position and expect me to be okay with it. So I ran. Away from Romania, away from my mistakes, away from memories of Theo and the times we had there together. It’s funny really, when I finished school I went to Romania to run away from it all, people’s expectations, and worse, their hopes for me. I thought working at the dragon sanctuary would be good, and it was, but at some point the solitude became loneliness and I wasn’t strong enough to admit that, so I clung on to Theo, who seemed to see me for who I was. And then…” Charlie faltered as his voice caught in his throat, “and then I got that letter. Just like that. Asking if I would be okay with living as a second choice, the one you pick when you get the occasional itch, and I should be thankful to be at his beck and call. So there it is,” he finished softly.

Charlie had a vivid memory of his first use of involuntary magic. He had been playing with his mother’s favorite vase; he knew he shouldn’t have but there were no flowers in it and he wanted to see if he could fit his hand inside. As soon as he reached up on his toes to take it off the counter it tipped away from him and rolled off. It fell and bounced, a ceramic vase  _ bounced _ like a ball into the air, a spiderweb of cracks spreading across the painted violets and time seemed to halt as he pleaded with it not to fall and break, to at least stay in one place till he could find the spell’o’tape. It hung in midair for what felt like eternity, probably not more than a few seconds, but it felt like eternity to a boy who’d never used magic of his very own, his despair cradling the vase with kid gloves above the tile floor. One perfect fragment fell out of place, his control too weak to handle such a delicate task, then the vase split into a hundred pieces and rained onto the kitchen floor.

This moment felt like that. Charlie could see the tension building as cracks of disappointment reached across Molly’s clenched jaw, the unearthly stillness crushing them all under the weight of the secret he’d kept for a decade and more.

Arthur sighed. The sound of his breath pierced the silence paralyzing them.

“The jam, I need fresh strawberries!” Molly announced in a choked sob, her head ducked as she swept out of the kitchen. Spoons and skillets rattled on the wall as she slammed the door behind her. 

“I don’t think she’ll find strawberries in January,” Charlie said, his voice hoarse.

“Charlie….” Arthur said.

“Dad, you promised,” Charlie interrupted, suddenly terrified.  “When you picked me up from Magical Law Enforcement you promised. You said no matter what… you’d always love me.”

“I did,” Arthur said nodding. “And it’s true.”

Charlie breathed a sigh of relief, but it felt premature. There was still some reservation in Arthur’s face that he didn’t like.

“I have to say, though, Charlie, I’m disappointed.”

Charlie felt the pit of his stomach drop and he looked down into his coffee mug. He felt Arthur’s hand on his shoulder and he slowly turned back to meet his father’s gaze.

“We’ve already lost one son. Do you think we could ever forgive ourselves if we had lost you too, to the bottle or a splinch, because you were afraid of us, of what we might say? Charlie, if there’s anything we did or said to make you feel afraid, then I am truly sorry.”

“To be fair, Dad, I think Mum’s reaction justifies my worry,” Charlie said. 

Arthur smiled. “Give her a minute. She just needs a minute to process, that’s all. Charlie, I’m sorry. I can’t imagine how alone you’ve felt all these years.” He wiped at the corner of his eye. “I hope you’ll give us a chance to make it up to you.”

The door rattled on its hinges and Charlie inhaled slowly to ready himself for Molly’s return. But it wasn’t Molly.

It was Bill, bouncing Victoire on his hip, Fleur trailing behind with a pair of brightly colored bags. She glanced from Charlie to Arthur, cocked an eyebrow, and headed upstairs with her luggage.

“What’s going on?” Bill asked. “I haven’t seen Mum degnome the garden since I told her I was marrying Fleur. Oh shit,” he said, eyes wide, “she found out about Ollivander, didn’t she?”

Charlie closed his eyes and willed himself to burst into flames. It didn’t work.

“What about Ollivander?” Arthur asked in a small voice.

“Actually hadn’t gotten to that part yet, bill,” Charlie said, gritting his teeth.

“Oh, shit!” Bill swore, frenetically patting Victoire on the back. “I mean, Ollivander? The guy who makes wands? I hear the bug-eyed son is running the place now.”

“He is not bug eyed!” Charlie snapped. Bill was lucky he was holding Victoire.

“What about Ollivander?” Arthur repeated.

“Yeah, Charlie, what about Ollivander?” Bill asked, a stupid grin on his face.

Charlie glared at Bill, then turned back to Arthur.

“Well, Dad, I’ve… been seeing someone,” Charlie began.

“I wonder who it is?” Bill whispered loudly.

“Can you have Fleur hold Victoire for a few minutes, so I can make your face turn colors?” Charlie growled.

“Boys, please,” Arthur sighed.

“Ollivander. I’ve been seeing Ollivander. The younger one. And it’s been good.”

“And?” Bill prompted, waggling his eyebrows like a moron.

“And that’s all that matters,” Charlie said, using what he hoped was a tone of finality. He took another sip of coffee. It had gotten cold.

A painful silence settled in, nothing but the whirring of clock gears and Victoire’s gurgling snores. Bill started fidgeting.

“So… what now?” Arthur managed.

Charlie shrugged. “Honestly, I never planned to get this far. Maybe I’ll head back to Percy’s for a while, give Mum some space.” 


	17. Chapter 17

“Are you gonna eat that?” Charlie asked, pointing a chip at Gabriel’s half eaten sandwich.

Gabriel looked up from his workbench where a wand was suspended in a jig and raised an eyebrow.

“No, but it’s probably cold.”

“Meh. Roast beef is good at any temperature,” Charlie said, grabbing the sandwich and stacking its basket onto his own empty one.

“Mmm, disagree. So, have you seen your Mum since you told her?”

Charlie shook his head. “No. You should have seen her face. You’d have thought I killed George.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Better this way than how it was before. How was it with your father?”

Gabriel snorted and pumped a crank, spinning the wand on its axis as he pressed a fine tipped knife to its side, shaving a narrow line in the wood.

“He said to me, ‘Gabriel, darling, do you think I did not know when I met you?’”

“Really? Weren’t you, like, eight or something?”

“Seven. Really took the air out of my sails. I spent the whole night rehearsing my speech. I journaled out every possible reaction I could imagine and my five year plan for what I would do in response to each scenario. I had forty-seven pages of notes! I felt robbed! But what can you do? My father sees more than he pretends to until it’s inconvenient for someone else. But seeing as our lineage is the way that it is, my preferences one way or another don’t really affect our bloodline. Speaking of, any plans for our next step with the Bloodwand and the Browns?”

The door swung open with a blast of cold air and Percy and Hermione walked in, stamping their feet to shake loose the snow caked to their boots.

“Morning, Charlie. Mr. Ollivander.” Percy said, taking off his glasses and wiping away the fog on the hem of his shirt.

Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “How many Weasley’s are there?” he asked Charlie.

Charlie shrugged. “Not sure.”

“Well! Where are my manners?” Gabriel said, standing and straightening his thin tie. “Welcome to Ollivander’s! How may we be of service?”

“It’s okay Gabriel, I don’t think they’re here to buy wands,” Charlie said. 

“Actually, we’re here to be of service to you, Mr. Ollivander,” Percy said. “Ms. Granger had a request to enter the Department of Mysteries approved recently, and I was able to pull some strings to have your request piggy-backed to hers, assuming you’re willing to say you’re her aides, if asked.”

“What are you there to see?” Charlie asked.

Hermione crossed her arms. “I’m afraid you don’t have the security clearance with Granger and Granger Associates to know the answer to that question.”

“Well I don’t see what kind of aides we could be if we don’t even know what you’re there to do.”

“The kind of aide with the clearance to hold my coat but not the kind of clearance to know what I’m there to do. Are you coming or not?”

“Of course we’re coming,” Gabriel said, setting the wand he was carving on a black cloth. “Don’t let Charlie tell you otherwise. Floo?”

Percy shook his head. “We’re going in the back way. I’d rather not parade you in right in front of my colleagues. It would be obvious that I fast tracked your request, and I’d rather not answer questions about that if I don’t have to. I have a reputation to maintain.”

“Where’s the back way in?” Charlie asked, tying his coat closed.

“The Department of Mysteries, of course,” Percy said, cracking a smile.

Charlie and Gabriel shared a look.

“The bar. In Knockturn Alley,” Percy finished.

“You’re kidding,” Charlie said. “ A little on the nose, don’t you think?”

“That would have been so helpful a few years ago,” Hermione muttered. “Charlie, don’t you work there?”

Charlie shrugged helplessly. “I just make sure people don’t sneak in after they’ve gotten the boot. Artemis doesn’t even let me behind the counter… which makes a lot of sense now.”

Percy checked his watch. “Well, shall we? I have a meeting.”

Gabriel fastened the last buttons of his gray peacoat and nodded. 

“I guess I’ll lead the way, then,” Charlie said, still dumbfounded. He walked out the door and Gabriel flipped the open sign around and locked up behind them.

They drew curious looks as they shouldered their way through the Diagon Alley lunch rush. It struck Charlie that at some point while he had been away Percy had made a name for himself, more so than himself or Bill, in any case, and not as the stuck up Weasley brother. Then again, he and Bill had been surpassed by all of their younger siblings. Except for Ron.

As they turned down the steep, run-down alley which fed into Knockturn proper, Charlie mustered his most fearsome bouncer face. The Knockturn regulars had grown accustomed to his presence and didn’t give him a second glance, but he didn’t want anyone pestering Percy or Hermione or especially Gabriel.

He needn’t have bothered. Knockturn Alley was about as busy Friday at noon as a library on game day, which was to say, empty except for Gabriel Ollivander and a couple other desperate people.

They reached the Department of Mysteries without incident, unless one counted Gabriel tripping over a loose cobblestone, and Charlie hammered on the door.

“I’ll be honest, Perce, I’m not sure anyone will be here right now,” Charlie said. Percy cocked an eyebrow but said nothing.

Sure enough, the peephole slid open, a pair of eyes appearing.

“Go away Weasley. We’re not going to put you up if you got kicked out,” Artemis said gruffly.

Percy stepped up to the peephole. “Official business,” he said, raising his Ministry badge.

The peephole shut and the door swung open.

“Mr. Weasley. Charlie. Rather not know what you’re doing, but let’s get the lot of you through here and out of my mind quick. Mind you don’t track in mud.”

They filed inside and Artemis slammed the door and refit the deadbolt. 

Hermione swept her hair out of her face and scanned the room, a look of shock on her face. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she sighed. She ran a finger over a glowglobe and grimaced at the grime. “This looks just like the real thing… not that I’ve seen the real thing, officially.”

“Oh, please,” Artemis said, leading them through a pair of saloon doors and into a stockroom crammed full of dusty barrels. “If I had a knut for everyone who’s been in Department of Mysteries unofficially, I wouldn’t need to work here anymore. All right Mr. Weasley, I’ll let you take them the rest of the way.”

Percy nodded and tipped his hat, and watched her disappear into the next room. He stepped over to a barrel in the corner, sitting alone under a half dozen tankards hanging from rusty nails. He slipped a small, nondescript coin into a slot underneath the tap and began passing out tankards. 

Charlie’s mouth suddenly felt like it was full of cotton. He shot a fearful glance at Percy.

“Don’t worry, Charlie,” Percy said quietly, patting him on the shoulder, “it’s not what it looks like. All right everyone, help yourself. You’ll only need a sip.”

One by one they poured a finger’s worth from the tap and stood in a circle. Percy raised his glass and drank, and vanished. Hermione disappeared next.

“It’s okay, Charlie. I’ll be right behind you,” Gabriel said. 

Charlie closed his eyes and emptied the tankard. He felt the familiar sensation of the ground falling away from underneath him, the jerking to the side, and the impossibly fast deceleration of magical teleportation. 

He opened his eyes again, looking around at the nondescript hallway. Three cloaked figures wore hoods drawn low over their faces. Charlie couldn’t distinguish any features in the dim light. Gabriel appeared at his elbow and slid his hand into Charlie’s, giving it a squeeze.

“Unspeakables,” Gabriel whispered. 

“Welcome to the Department of Mysteries,” the middle Unspeakable said. “Papers, please.”

Percy handed a small scroll to the nearest Unspeakable. 

“See you,” he said, as the Unspeakable led him down the hall.

Hermione held out two scrolls like the one Percy had. “I’m heading to the Tribunal of Magical Beasts. These two are going to Historical Docs.”

“This way, Ms. Granger.” 

The second Unspeakable led Hermione the same direction Percy went. The last Unspeakable turned the other direction, motioning with the scroll for them to follow.

They passed a handful of other Unspeakables guiding visitors down the winding corridors. All of the doors looked identical, glossy black doors with brushed nickel knobs. They’d only been walking for a few minutes, but Charlie was already sure he would never be able to find his way back to where they’d entered. 

The Unspeakable finally stopped at a door and turned to face them.

“Here is the Historical Archive. Please be mindful that some of these texts are extremely delicate, even if they are protected by preservation charms. If you need assistance handling any of the manuscripts, please do not hesitate to ask.”

Gabriel rolled his eyes.

“I will remain outside the door until you are ready to leave the Department of Mysteries. Please be aware that we will not hesitate to subdue and obliviate you if you threaten the sanctity of the Department of Mysteries. Furthermore, wands are not allowed inside the Archive. I will hold them for you until you are ready to depart.”

Gabriel hesitated, but ultimately handed over his wand. Charlie smiled and followed suit. He knew it must be tearing Gabriel apart to hand over his wand to an anonymous Unspeakable.

“Thank you. You may take as much time as you need.”

Charlie followed Gabriel inside.

“Ooh!” Gabriel said he spun in a circle with a gleeful grin, his eyes dancing across the titles on the shelves ringing the small room. 

Charlie’s heart sank.

“Lambert’s Lamentations! Oh my god, oh my god!”

“Gabriel.”

“This book isn’t supposed to exist! Oh no, don’t tell me, is this… could it be? The Redemption of the Red Mage! Charlie! Tell me you brought snacks!”

“I didn’t.” 

“Oh, good! They provide paper and quills … ugh, I don’t like this shade of legal pad, but that’s okay… I’ll transcribe the notes onto something suitable when I get home....”

“So, what’s the name of the book we’re looking for?”

“The fuck! Dewey Decimal System?”

“That’s the name of the book?”

“No. The Dewey Decimal System is the worst fucking library classification system ever designed! Why don’t they use Hogwarts Standard?”

“No, not the name of the …. library classification system, the name of the book that we’re looking for. “

“I’m not sure the name of the book is going to help if they don’t use a reasonable classification system! Oh, here it is…”

Charlie sighed and pulled a pair of chairs away from a table. Gabriel slid into the nearest and gingerly set the book on the table.

“I can’t believe they don’t allow wands in here. Magic really is the best way to turn the pages without damaging the piece. Now I have to do this one page at a time…” 

Charlie’s mouth fell open. “You’re kidding.”

Gabriel glared at him. “I most certainly am not. These are priceless artifacts, and I’m not going to be that guy who rips the page of a priceless artifact,” Gabriel said. He put his gloves on and started painstakingly turning the pages.

Charlie slumped forward on the table and settled his chin on his hands. He watched the twisted hands spin lazily on the clock, his eyelids drooping as Gabriel’s rhythmic muttering and page turning lulled him to sleep. 

He couldn’t be sure how much time had passed, but when Gabriel shook him awake again he was lying in a puddle of drool.

“Wha-what?” he sputtered, wiping his chin clean.

“Here’s the poem!” Gabriel said, eagerly pointing at the yellowed page.

“What is this, Gobbledygook?”

“Well, it’s certainly not something you should be breathing on. Thanks, babe. It’s Middle English.”

“It looks like a different language.”

“It functionally is. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Browns raided my shop after seeing this manuscript here and realizing they had no way of deciphering it. My text at least has a commentary. Can you hold that light closer? Squinting like this hurts my eyes. Thanks. It’s a miracle everyone at the Department of Mysteries doesn’t wear glasses.”

“What’s it say?” Charlie redirected gently, moving the lantern directly over the book.

“These lines here are waxing poetically about some guy named John Longpants, or something like that. Probably the patron of the author. Or the author himself.”

“Longpants?”

“Try not to get bogged down in the details, will you Charlie?”

Charlie smirked but kept quiet. He yawned loudly. 

“Ooh, ooh, here we go… okay, so this guy, his family was picked off by a rival… okay so he made this wand that… okay, what does that word mean again? Oh right, okay, the hotter the spell fire rages… that’s got to be just a metaphor, the higher the flames that threaten those of purest blood… wait a second.” Gabriel stopped, and his finger slid backward on the page, “now that is interesting.” 

“What is it?” 

“This word,” he said, lightly tapping the page. ”If you read the translations that are published these days, they interpret this word as ‘pure,’ but that’s not the only way to understand it. I can see why they translate it as ‘pure,’ but still… it means, like, most choice, or most fitting.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, this particular wand may have nothing to do with purebloods at all. It might be just another family wand. There’s nothing in this poem to hint at wand wood or style of make, so this is just another dead end as far as identifying any particular wand as the Bloodwand.”

“Well, couldn’t that be talking about your family? I mean, wandmakers and all that.”

Gabriel shook his head. “Not likely. Remember how I said that old wands look different and were made differently than they are now? Well, that’s partially because a lot of people made their own wands back then, so the fact that this character in this poem made a wand doesn’t identify him as any particular family any more so than this poem identifies any particular wand.” 

“So, what now?”

“I don’t know. What this does mean is that the Browns are no closer to finding the wand than we are. Which is good, I guess? If they can’t positively identify it then we don’t have to worry about them using it to come after us.”

“Or, they will keep pursuing us, thinking that we’re hunting for the wand. Oh, you broke off a piece of quill. I imagine you don’t want to close the book on that. Might leave an indent.”

Gabriel paused, looking back and forth between Charlie and the cracked quill.

“Did you bring that in here?”

“Professor McGonagall would tell you I never voluntarily brought a quill anywhere. Are you saying that’s not yours?” 

Gabriel shook his head. “I don’t use dark feathered quills. They can stain a book if you’re not careful.” He nudged the quill. There was a faint outline from where the closed book had pressed it into the page. 

“Do you know what that is then? Whoever was on this page last accidentally left a piece of their quill in there. Isn’t there magic that can use this piece to track the rest? We can find whatever notes the Brown’s took and figure out literally everything they know.”

“I can do you one better,” Gabriel said, eagerly rubbing his hands together. “Do you have a knife on you?”

Charlie nodded and pulled his buck knife out of his belt and set it on the table.

Gabriel eyed it suspiciously.

“What’s the matter? You asked if I had a knife.”

“I did. This is a sword.”

Charlie laughed in spite of himself. “What do you need cut? I can handle it.”

“No, no, that’s fine. And I have to do it. Beginning to end. Hand me that quill.”

Gabriel took the knife and cut a slit along the quill. He held it close to his face, turning it over and examining the cut carefully.

“This won’t do,” he said shaking his head. He pushed the quill away. “Can you grab me another quill? Yeah, that big one over there. Nice. Okay, let’s try this again.”

Gabriel bent over the fresh quill and Charlie held the lamp close for him. He squinted and muttered incoherently. Charlie swallowed nervously. He wasn’t sure what Gabriel was up to, but he had the distinct feeling that any variation in the lighting from the lantern he was holding could throw off Gabriel as he painstakingly cut a slit into the new quill shaft.

Gabriel set down the knife and held the quill up to the light.

“Perfect,” he said, nodding to himself. He picked up Charlie’s knife again and flipped the black feather from the book onto the blade. Charlie held his breath as Gabriel steered the black feather barbs into the slit he had cut. He squeezed the slit closed.

“I need something to hold this closed. Do you have anything in your pockets? Wood glue, by any chance? Wax?”

Charlie dug into his pockets. He had some loose change and a couple of food wrappers, but he wasn’t about to pull those out for Gabriel to see. He stood up and glanced around the Archive, wondering if by chance there was a leftover candle. Behind him Gabriel was turning in his chair, carefully keeping the quill tightly closed in his hand, eyes scanning the shelves. 

A thought occurred to Charlie and he walked back to the table. “Is it okay if it’s gross?” 

“Um… yes? Maybe?”

Charlie lifted his boot and peeled a piece of pink chewing gum off of the sole and held it out for Gabriel. 

“Really?” Gabriel sighed, wrinkling his nose. “Fine.” 

He took the gum and smeared a chunk into the crack. 

“Okay, I need you to hold this quill in place on the table, and do not, and I repeat, do not let it move. If I get this wrong, we could die.”

“Really?”

“Well, maybe not die, but your eyebrows won’t be red for a while. Just… hold still.”

Charlie held his breath as Gabriel pressed the tip of the knife into the shaft of the quill and carved a series of runes. He licked his thumb and ran it down the length of the quill, muttering incantations as he squeezed each rune. Gabriel leaned back, and the runes glowed one at a time and then vanished. 

“I take it whatever you did worked?”

Gabriel raised an eyebrow and nodded smugly.

“So, what exactly did you do?”

“I just made a wand… well, not a wand, per se, more of a single-use spell device. Like your brother’s… fartmaster.”

“So… what are you going to do with it? I’m guessing this doesn’t have to do with farting.”

Gabriel rolled his eyes. “Obviously not. Pass me that inkwell, will you? Thanks, babe. This is an extremely limited spell device, because we don’t have much remaining of the original quill, so if I ask too much of it I might burn out the core.”

“Wait, so the quill we found in the book is the core of a wand made out of another quill?”

“Pretty badass, right?” Gabriel ripped a page off the legal pad and dipped the quill wand into the inkwell and set it to the page. “Remember,” he whispered, and the quill stood upright and flicked across the page, scribbling in a shaky, uncertain handwriting. 

 

_ Mr. Gregorovitch, _

 

_ I have sought out the source material as you suggested, and you are wrong. There is nothing in this ridiculous poem to positively identify my family or any other as the owners of the Bloodwand. This exercise has been a waste of my time. There is now no way to verify if one of my wands is this historical Bloodwand as the rumors suggest. We must cut to the chase now and move forward with my original suggestion. I have made an appointment for you to come to my home for an appraisal on the twelfth, at which point you will choose a wand from my collection to certify as the genuine Bloodwand. _

 

  1. _Nott_



 

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Gabriel gasped as the quill signed and fell on its side. “Gregorovitch, that snake! He couldn’t make a decent wand to save his life so he moved into the business of fraud?”

“To be fair, we don’t know that he verified that wand,” Charlie said, his mouth dry as he read the signature for the fourth time.

“Oh, Charlie, you’re sweet. Of course he verified that wand. I bet C. Nott has it framed in some creepy room with green wallpaper and too much taxidermy right now. We have to get in that house.”

“We will not. Do you have what you need?”  
Gabriel sighed, looking longingly at the bookshelves he hadn’t examined yet. “Yes.”

“All right, pack up your notes and let’s go.”

They gathered Gabriel’s scribbled notes, the recreated Nott note, and the quill wand into their pockets. 

Hermione was waiting for them outside with a thick folio under her arm, her Unspeakable lingering silently at her shoulder. She checked her watch pointedly. 

“Sorry it took so long,” Charlie said. “Is there anywhere quiet we can talk?”

“It’s the Department of Mysteries,” Hermione scoffed. “Privacy bubble, please.”

Her Unspeakable raised a hand and a shimmering field of pale blue light shot up around them. 

“You can speak freely now. What did you find?”

“Cantankerous Nott was here, looking at the same book,” Charlie said.

Hermione arched an eyebrow. “Cantankerous Nott? That’s interesting. I saw in the  _ Prophet _ the son is getting married soon.”

“Saturday,” Gabriel said, nodding.

“Already?” Charlie said, clenching his jaw. He’d all but succeeded in banishing Theo from his mind over the past few months.

“Tis the season, now that the  _ Sacred Nineteen _ is on shelves. Rumor is that Cantankerous Nott wrote the  _ Sacred Nineteen. _ That’s the easiest answer anyway, given that he wrote the  _ Sacred Twenty-Eight  _ all those years ago. But he hasn’t publicly taken credit for it if he is the author,” Hermione said.

“Cantankerous would take credit for something he hasn’t written, so if he’s not trying to take credit, that’s proof to me that he didn’t write it,” Charlie said. “But I don’t see with what has to do with an old poem about a wand.”

“Well he certainly benefited from it being published, if nothing else. His son conveniently got engaged, what, a couple weeks after it hit the shelves?” Gabriel mused, as if he hadn’t heard Charlie’s attempt at redirecting the conversation.

“He didn’t marry all that well though,” Hermione said, shifting the folio to her other hand. “I’ve been digging into money seized from convicted Death Eaters and their financial backers for a lawsuit that… well that lawsuit is none of your business, but what matters, is that the Greengrasses, Nott’s new in-laws, got hit hard. They’re just this side of bankrupt.”

“Wait a second,” Charlie said, lowering his voice instinctively as an Unspeakable guided another Department of Mysteries visitor past them. “I looked through the  _ Sacred Nineteen _ when I was trying to figure out who Tabitha and Renard might be. It’s a total sausage fest. Sure, the Notts might have some money a little money left in their estates, but the Notts are the ones getting the better end of the deal… the Greengrass daughters are some of the only pureblood daughters left. Astoria and Daphne have their pick of the litter. The  _ Sacred Nineteen  _ publication reminded all the old families that their pureblood status is threatened, so the Notts jumped at Daphne.”

“And one way to make Theo Nott look more attractive to the Greengrasses would be to claim that they are the rightful owners of the Bloodwand…” Gabriel added, nodding. 

Charlie thought back to that long and terrible night he’d spent petrified and freezing to death in Knockturn Alley and what Tabitha and Renard had said to him.

“When Tabitha and Renard jumped me in the alley, they said they knew of my ‘proclivities,’ they knew what I was home for and that they don’t play nice in their family, or some crap like that. They must have thought I was here to stop their cousin’s wedding.”

“Were you?” Gabriel asked quietly.

Charlie shook his head. “No. It was over.”

Hermione glanced between them. “Do you think that a distant Greengrass cousin would be that invested in the wedding, or that in the know?”

Charlie shrugged. “Maybe the Greengrasses offered them money.”

“Or maybe,” Gabriel interjected, “they think that if their cousin marries into the Notts, they will all be able to use the Bloodwand themselves, and that they think that you’re here to do the same thing, and you want to stop the wedding to have another crack at the wand yourself. No pun intended.”

Charlie rolled his eyes. “Okay, so we have a theory. Now what?”

“You have to get the Bloodwand before they do,” Hermione said. 

“Do we?”

“Yes Charlie, you do,” she said, and held up a hand to quash any protest. “They’ve come after both of you, violently, just because they thought you might be looking for the Bloodwand. Suppose Daphne marrying Theo actually does give Tabitha and Renard the ability to control it. The first thing they will have to do is tie up loose ends, and you are the messiest loose end, because you’re a rival who knows about them. And trust me when I say that wizards with powerful magical artifacts hate rivals.”

“Great,” Charlie sighed.

Gabriel swallowed and leaned into Charlie’s shoulder, “So how do we get in?”

Hermione shrugged and started buttoning her coat. “Break in? Steal it? Set fire to the Nott estate? Use your imagination. Whatever it is though, make sure you do it before Daphne and Theo tie the knot… no pun intended. Also, don’t tell me. I don’t want to lie under oath. I have a reputation.”

“Okay. Thanks, Hermione,” Charlie said. He took a deep breath. “I think I need to do the unthinkable.”


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone! I made a bit of a mistake and I originally posted this chapter 18 in place of chapter 17. If you've been following this story as I've posted be sure to check out chapter 17, it has important plot stuff.
> 
> Thanks for your patience!

“My, how the tables have turned!” Bill said, grinning wickedly. He cradled a sleeping Victoire on his chest, one leg kicked up on the kitchen table. “So you finally got wise, have you? I hear you’ve gotten help from Percy, George, even baby Ron and baby Ginny… but I guess they didn’t come through for you. But now things have gotten hairy and you’ve come looking for the cream of the crop?”

Gabriel cleared his throat and feigned interest in the needlepoint tablecloth. Charlie didn’t know why he expected Bill to be on moderately good behavior. Maybe it was because everything else in the world had gotten so strange.

Charlie crossed his arms. “Actually, George, Ron, and Ginny are already on board, and Percy is busy. I thought if you’d found out I asked everyone but you, your fragile feelings would get hurt. I don’t really need your help. Gabriel, let’s go.”

Bill gasped in mock injury. “Really, Charlie?” He nestled Victoire against his shoulder and leaned forward to place his hand on Charlie’s shoulder, pulling him back into his seat. “I think we both know what this is about.”

Charlie looked at Gabriel, who was still pretending not to hear their conversation.

“Enlighten me.”

“You still want your big brother’s approval for things you do and…” Bill pointed his chin at Gabriel, “who you date.”

“I regret all the decisions in my life that have led me to this point. You coming or not?”

Fleur walked in briskly, straightening the lapel of her suit. “Mr. Ollivander. Charlie. Where are you going?” she asked as she opened the refrigerator.

“We’re going to sneak into the Nott-Greengrass wedding and steal a mysterious wand of unknown ability and dubious origin,” Gabriel volunteered cheerfully.

Fleur took an apple and a white carton out of the refrigerator and folded them up in brown paper. “Is it dangerous?”

Gabriel hesitated. “Possibly,” he said.

“Take Bill with you. Since he stopped curse breaking he’s become insufferable.”

“Broke all the curses. Occupational hazard for the brilliant,” Bill said.

Fleur rolled her eyes. “Of course, darling.”

“Well if you have no intention to do anything but gloat into a mirror, we’re going,” Charlie said, pushing himself back from the table and gathering his coat.

Bill sighed. “I’ll come, I’ll come. I’ll even wear one of my less fantastic suits so you I don’t make you look too bad.”

“Suit?” Charlie repeated.

“What, don’t tell me you’re planning on sneaking into a wedding dressed like… well, whatever it is you call that look you go for. How exactly would you describe your look?”

“I wouldn’t,” Charlie snapped.

Bill shrugged. “Well, regardless, if you at least dress the part, people won’t immediately mark us as crashers.”

“Don’t you think arriving with an army of redheads is a dead giveaway?”

“Think, Charlie. We’re in the _Sacred Nineteen_ too. Mum and Dad get invited to weird Pureblood shit all the time. It’s a courtesy they show us because we’re Purebloods, with the implicit understanding that we will never show, but this time we’ll actually be gauche enough to show up.”

“Did you RSVP?” Fleur asked, bending down to give Bill and Victoire a kiss goodbye.

“Nope,” Charlie said.

“That is gauche. I’ll see you tonight, darling,” she said, before stepping into the living room and vanishing into the Floo in a roar of flame.

“Fine. I’ll swing by Madame Malkin’s before the big day,” Charlie ceded.

“Good. I don’t want you embarrassing me,” Bill said, resettling Victoire on his knee as she stirred awake. There was a knock on the door. “Oh, heads up, Dad’s here to pick up Victoire. Mum’s watching Victoire today.”

The kitchen door swung open with a wave of cold air and Arthur entered, tightly bundled in a heavy brown coat and a thick red scarf.

Charlie looked at Arthur, then at Gabriel, then fought the urge to vomit. How was it that everyone in his family had such horrendous timing? If he believed in such things, he’d say he’d been born under the star of feeling perpetually awkward.

“Morning, Dad,” Bill said brightly, “Coffee, tea? I don’t have to leave for a while yet,” he said, and swung Charlie’s empty chair around to offer it to Arthur.

Arthur pulled his scarf away form his pink neck and looked at Charlie apprehensively. “I mean, I don’t want to impose.”

“Not imposing. No imposition,” Bill assured him. “By the way, have you met Gabriel Ollivander?”

As much as Charlie despised Bill in that moment, and his delight at the discomfort of others, and as much as he planned to make him suffer later, he was grateful that someone else was talking.

“Dad, this is Gabriel,” Charlie stammered. As uncomfortable as he was, as unprepared as he felt for this, Charlie didn’t want Gabriel to feel like he was embarrassed of him. “We’ve been… uh… seeing each other.”

“Hi Gabriel,” Arthur said slowly, taking off a glove to shake Gabriel’s hand. “I’m Arthur. So, I hear you make wands? How is the wand business?”

“Good! Splendid. I mean, it’s a little slow right now, in the winter. But that’s normal! Has been the case since 382 BC. Definitely not just the case during my tenure. Don’t want you to think Ollivander’s is in trouble, or anything,” Gabriel said, adjusting his glasses twice and glancing nervously at Charlie.

“Oh, I’ve seen your vault, Ollivander. No one’s worried,” Bill said.

“You did not go into his vault,” Charlie snarled.

“Well, if he’s going to date my brother. And it’s not like I took anything.”

“Boys, please,” Arthur groaned, rubbing his temple. “I honestly thought you would have grown out of this by now.”

Bill shrugged and patted Victoire. She signed to him, and Bill set her down and she ran over to hug Arthur. Arthur swept her up into his arms and bounced her on his hip.

“Just trying to be a good big brother.”

“”How’s Mum?” Charlie asked, his voice suddenly hoarse.

Arthur took a deep breath. “It’s… not been easy for her. Not that you did anything wrong, it’s just…. “ he paused, searching for the right words, “it’s just that as a parent you convince yourself you see so much, that you have eyes on the back of your head, that you have a sixth sense about your children, that they can’t hide from you. And then, to find out, that you missed so much. It was obvious that you were pulling away, but we never would have guessed why. You haven’t changed… I guess… you’ve always been you, and we never saw you. It makes me wonder how much we didn’t see, about the rest of you, too. Molly prided herself on being a good parent, and now she’s second guessing everything.”

“Sorry,” Charlie said. He didn’t mean it.

“No, no, it’s not you,” Arthur said quickly. “What if we lost you, and we never knew you? What if… it had been Fred, and we never knew?”

Charlie crossed his arms. Fred’s death had been a huge blow to them all, no doubt to George most. But Arthur’s explanation felt more like an excuse, like they were leaning on mourning for Fred as a crutch so they didn’t have to deal with any of their other problems. It was his life. He didn’t think it was fair to see his life through Fred’s death.

That had always been the problem; their inability, or their unwillingness, to see of their children without the others. That night Arthur brought him home from the Magical Law Enforcement precinct office after the fight at the Quidditch match, Arthur claimed that he saw them as individuals, not as part of a larger group identity. Charlie believed Arthur believed what he said, but the way they handled themselves when the going got tough suggested otherwise.

“George came around awful quick,” he said.

Arthur frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Do you think George can go a single day without thinking about Fred? A single minute? Every time he looks in the mirror, there he is. Fred’s absence is with him every second of the day. But that didn’t stop him from getting used to who I date.”

“Especially not if he gets to make wand jokes,” Bill muttered.

“I hate you and everything you stand for.”

“Boys!”

Bill smirked. Charlie decided he would have to wait until Arthur was gone to punch Bill.

“What do you need from us?” Arthur asked, hanging his head. Victoire pulled on his ear and giggled.

“No more assumptions. Just ask. I don’t expect you to know or understand everything, but when you don’t even ask it makes it feel like you’re afraid of me. Or that you don’t care.”

Arthur already looked ashamed, and Charlie felt like he was kicking a dog, but he felt a huge weight lift from his shoulders nonetheless.

“I’m sorry, Charlie. We’ve done wrong by you. We never meant to hurt you. We’ll do our best to do better.”

“That’s all I ask. And please, don’t wallow. I’m not asking you to do penance. We’re not Catholic.”

Gabriel snorted and clapped his hand over his mouth.

Bill raised an eyebrow. “Glad you find his jokes funny.”

“I’ll give you a different kind of punchline,” Charlie said, cringing as the terrible pun fell out of his mouth.

“Wow. That was bad. Even for you. Have you been hanging out with Ron?”

“Yeah, can we pretend that didn’t happen?”

“So,” Arthur said, smiling nervously. “What are you boys up to?”

Bill, Charlie, and Gabriel shared a look.

“I don’t want to know, do I?”

Bill shrugged at Charlie. Charlie nodded.

“See if you can keep up, Dad,” Bill began, furrowing his brow as he began to recount. “So Charlie’s ex’s future in-laws are under the impression he came back from Romania to stop a wedding over a dispute over a family’s heirloom wand of immeasurable power, and we are going to sneak into Charlie’s ex’s house during the wedding to steal the wand so his ex’s future in-laws won’t be able to use the wand to kill Charlie. Also, the wand may not exist, and it seems that the Greengrasses wrote the _Sacred Nineteen_ to marry off their daughters before their family fortune completely runs out.”

“So, the usual then?”


	19. Chapter 19

“You clean up nice,” Bill said, adjusting Charlie’s tie so it fit tightly around his neck.

Charlie winced, slipping a finger between his shirt collar and neck.

“Does it have to be so tight?”

Bill smirked and picked a tiny piece of lint off Charlie’s shoulder.

“Yes,” he said. “The point is to show you can unflappably endure sartorial discomfort, irritated skin be damned.”

“Great.” Charlie tugged the tie looser. “And Bill, by the way, I don’t want you to think that I don’t hate you and everything you stand for, but thanks for helping with Dad yesterday.”

Bill smiled. “Don’t worry, Charlie, I hate you too.” 

They shifted awkwardly on their feet and Bill sat down on the edge of his old bed. It creaked under his weight.

“Can you believe how long it’s been since we lived here?” he said.

“Please Bill, don’t get all sentimental on me,” Charlie sighed, glancing out the bedroom window. It was beginning to snow and the sun was bright. It was the kind of morning he would have dreaded when he was still drinking. “At least there was no family tree on the wall back then. Didn’t Mum say she had one done for you at your house?”

“She certainly did.”

“I didn’t see it when I was there.”

Bill shrugged with a cocky grin. “One of the most common defensive tomb glyphs was a rune that only became visible when certain people were present. Pretty easy to do.”

“So yours is only visible when Mum or Dad are there.”

“You’re not as dumb as you look. Mum still sort of sees Fleur as an adversary from the Hundred Years War, and she would undoubtedly blame Fleur if we covered it up. It was the easiest way for Mum to still be happy without Fleur or myself having to look at that god awful painting.”

Charlie lowered himself to his own bed across from Bill. The beds were so close in the tiny room that their knees were almost touching. He checked his watch. They still had a couple minutes before they planned on meeting with Gabriel. Ron, George, and Ginny should have arrived already. He should have known they’d run late.  

“Are we really doing her any favors, babying her like this?” Charlie asked.

Bill shrugged halfheartedly. “I’ve wondered that a lot too. I wish I knew what to do. This balancing act… living the life I want with the woman I love despite it not fitting neatly into Mum’s worldview, it’s exhausting.” Bill reached out and clapped Charlie on the shoulder. “Preview of your life to come. I wish I could say it gets easier. When I first got with Fleur, Mum went through this initial shock period. Degnoming the garden, so to speak. But then came her suggestions, of how things might be better if you just did things this way instead of that. You wouldn’t believe how often she tells me about this healer or that healer who she thinks could, and I quote, restore Victoire’s hearing. I mostly just ignore it. I don’t know, Charlie. I worry we’re all just enabling her.”

“What if she’s a tougher and better person than we’re giving her credit for? I mean, she blew up Bellatrix Lestrange. She’s got to be hardier than we realize.”

“She is. I think she is. But since the war she’s doubled down on all this good wife and mother crap. Audrey says she needs to talk to someone about grief and all that shit.”

“Audrey would know,” Charlie said. “Percy’s the most honest of us all these days, huh?”

Bill shook his head. “Not really. No more than you. You hid in work and Romania. Perce hid in work and Muggle London. Not all that different. But you know Percy. He always has been and he always will be distant.”

“You’ve gotten insightful in your old age. But that doesn’t help me with Mum.”

“Never said I could. Listen, just do what you’re going to do. Mum is going to give you shit. She’s giving us all shit. I know that doesn’t make it easier, but if we give in too much she’ll never come around. She’ll try to give a peace offering of sorts. Dad fully comes around first, but that’s only because he doesn’t have the backbone she does.”

“Great,” Charlie said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m tired of all this, Bill.”

“I know, Charlie.”

Charlie sighed and his gaze fell on his skroot coat on the back of the chair. 

“Remember that time we almost burned down the Burrow?”

Bill grinned. “Fuck yeah. Dad should have known better than to take up smoking a pipe. He got sloppy, leaving all those matches around.”

Charlie summoned his coat and unbuttoned the pocket with Theo’s letter. He tossed it on the ground.

“Want to have one more fire in here?”

“Sure,” Bill said with a shrug. “What are we burning?”

“It’s probably simplest to just read it.”

Bill picked it up and unfolded it. Charlie scratched his chin nervously as he watched Bill read. 

“So this is the fucker whose party we’re crashing?”

Charlie nodded and Bill dropped the letter and they drew their wands.

“One, two, three!” Charlie counted, and then they cast incendio in unison. The letter ignited immediately and was a smoldering pile of ash in seconds. 

Charlie felt a wave of relief wash over him.

“That was fun,” he said, admiring the fresh scorch mark on the floorboards. 

“Well, the real party hasn’t even started yet,” Bill said, pointing at the clock. “We should head downstairs. Even if Ron and Ginny are late I don’t think you want your boy Gabriel walking through the floo to encounter our depressed and sullen mother by himself. The floor would collapse under the weight of all that awkward.”

Charlie nodded and loosened his tie more when Bill walked out of the bedroom, and followed him downstairs.

The third board on the second landing creaked underneath him. HIs father tried to fasten the board down with a sticking charm, but he’d never considered the possibility that Fred and George placed a charm of their own to make a creaking sound any time someone stepped on it.

Charlie paused on the creaky landing and looked up at the hideous family tree wrapping up the wall like an invasive vine. Fleur’s face looked back with a severe expression, outlined in rich and vibrant colors. Harry, Hermione, and Audrey’s faces were also drawn in, but they were still fuzzy and dull. Next to Charlie’s own face, covering the empty slot on the wall, hung a small picture frame with a cheap painting of an empty grass field.

“I take it Mum put this up?” Charlie said, tapping his fingernail on the glass.

Bill stopped on the stairs below him and looked back at Charlie with a grim smile. He shrugged, but for once he seemed to have nothing to say.

Charlie lifted the picture frame off the wall and dropped it. The frame cracked against the stairs and the painting fell out of the back. 

The magic of the family tree had begun work on another face, next to Charlie’s, which had been hidden by the picture frame. It was a faint outline, a simple sketch, little more than an oval face with a pair of rectangular glasses.

Bill smirked. “Don’t read too much into it. The magic of these paintings is pretty simple. When you begin seeing somebody, we can see them too. The longer you’re seeing them, the easier it is for us to see them. Come on, you can look at that later.”

They heard the fireplace roar, and Charlie rushed past Bill and stumbled down the stairs.

He froze as he entered the kitchen, his mother at her customary post at the kitchen sink. She scrubbed furiously at a fork, hands pink and soapy water dripping from her elbows. There were no other dishes out, clean or dirty. Just the one fork in her hands.

“Mum?” he said, genuinely worried.

She dunked the fork into the water and held it up to the light. “This smudge.... It won’t come out,” she sniffed.

“Okay, Mum. I’ll see you soon.”

She turned to face him, eyes red, and mustered a pained smile. “Of course, dear. Love you,” she touched his shoulder. “And Charlie? Could you pick up some Floo powder on the way home?”

Charlie fought the urge to roll his eyes. Was this the peace offering Bill promised? The fireplace roared again and he heard voices in the next room. 

“Sure, Mum. I’ve got to go.”

Bill took him by the arm and led him to the living room.

“Almost forgot you were there.”

“I was right behind you, Charlie. I’m stealthy.”

“Bullshit.”

“You better hope I’m stealthy, or things will get hairy in a hurry at the Nott’s.”

They entered the living room and Charlie found his worst nightmare realized: Gabriel alone with George, Ron, and Ginny. His siblings were still covered in soot, and Gabriel stood in the corner by the orange armchair. Gabriel’s gray suit was free of soot, his fedora balanced just so on his head, and he held a bright red bag under his arm.

“Okay, whatever it is, that’s enough,” Charlie snapped, glaring at Ginny, Ron, and George, stepping defensively in front of Gabriel and crossing his arms.

Gabriel touched his forehead to Charlie’s back. “It’s okay. They were just curious about the present.”

“Wait, you got a present?”

“That’s literally all I said, right George?” Ginny said, looking between Ron and George. They nodded enthusiastically.

“I thought we might blend in better if we brought presents,” Gabriel explained. “Evidently I’m the only one who had that thought.”

“Okay, well, it can’t hurt,” Charlie said. He hoped Gabriel didn’t spend too much money on it. The odds of it getting blown up were high. “Everybody ready?”

Ginny smiled and opened her green Harpy coat, revealing her prized bludger bat hanging from her hip, and buttoned her coat closed again. “Aye aye, Captain,” she said. The other Weasleys nodded.

“Okay, good. Now remember, we’re going to a wedding, and if we act the part, we’ve a good chance to do some good investigating without any active confrontations. Since it’s a pureblood wedding, we’re hoping they’ll have their family heirlooms on display and private rooms opened up to show off, so we can look around. The Brown’s and whoever else they’ve recruited probably won’t be looking to start a fight in front of guests, so don’t start one yourself. If you get seen by the Brown’s try to get them to follow you so the rest of us can look around.”

“Are you honestly telling us not to start a fight? You, of all people?” George asked, scowling.

“Who put you in charge?” Ginny demanded.

“I have to pee,” Ron said.

“I hate all of you,” Charlie growled. Gabriel squeezed his arm.

“Okay, kids, let’s move. Portkey?” Bill said.

George pulled a flowery green vase out of a burlap sack and set it gingerly on the floor, careful not to touch it with his bare skin.

“We should have polyjuiced,” Ron mused.

“Well maybe next time, you can have a better idea from the start, and then maybe…” Charlie started, until Gabriel grabbed his hand and planted it on the vase, the other Weasleys jumping forward to follow suit.

 

They landed in a garden, lush and green, which was odd, considering it was still the dead of winter. A nominal dusting of snow frosted the hip high hedges and bright yellow flowers, like a freak spring snowstorm had swept through.

“Nice place,” George said with a low whistle.

Charlie raised an eyebrow. It hadn’t been, the one time he’d paid a brief visit to Nott manor. He’d come through the gardens that time too. He never made it past the foyer, before Old Man Cantankerous came shuffling through, all eyebrows and nose and ear hair with an angry curse spewing from his cracked lips.

“Probably had to sell a thing or two to bring in gardeners to lay down some warming charms.”

“Let’s hope they didn’t sell the Bloodwand,” George murmured.

Another pair of dark-suited guests ported in just behind them.

“Let’s get moving,” Charlie said, nodding in greeting at the other guests, or the real guests, who eyed them up and down and took the far path through the garden.

George punched him in the shoulder. “Why are you making that face? You look like you’re constipated.”

“I was smiling.”

“Well, don’t.”

“You’re such amateurs!” Ginny groaned. “Let’s go already. This is a smash and grab. Don’t dally.” Ginny turned and led the way, stomping her heavy boots. 

They followed the other couple through the twisted wrought iron gate into the courtyard of Nott manor, dominated by a pair of weeping willows enchanted with countless specks of light in place of leaves. The crumbling steps leading to the riveted doors had been repaired, so Charlie didn’t have to watch his step this time. Animated suits of armor pulled the doors open, vambraces gleaming in the winter sun, bowing low as they passed into the octagonal foyer.

The chandelier had been shined and lit, once listing candelabras straightened and heavy with thick curling vines. A massive portrait of a neck ruffed choir belted an odd, discordant requiem, and floating platters of glittering champagne flutes drifted in and around clusters of people, pausing to allow guests to take a glass. Carved pedestals sat in each corner of the octagonal room, displaying macabre trophies of limbs, daggers, and other pureblood oddities.

A thin, dark-barked tree reached out of the center of a checkered marble floor, its tallest branches mingling with the chandelier. A long branch spun around the edge of the room drooping with the weight of a purple coat of arms dangling from the tip.

“A little gaudy, don’t you think? George whispered in his ear.

“Knock it off. People are already staring,” Charlie said. He wasn’t kidding. Their army of redheads would stick out anywhere, but most of all at a traditional pureblood wedding. They were more likely to be spotted in someone else’s vault than one of these affairs.

“Well that’s what happens when you’re so damn good looking,” George said, mock slicking back his hair into a sloppy imitation of the heavily greased hair style of most of the men there.

“Stop. George, you come with me and Gabriel. We’ll take the hall to the left. Bill, take Ron and Ginny, and take the hall to the right. Check out what they have on display. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll have the Bloodwand out to impress guests.”

“No one gets lucky with Ron around,” Ginny coughed. 

Charlie sighed but didn’t bother responding. They could stand there riffing all day if left to their own devices.

They split up and began making their way around the foyer, stopping to give token attention to the bizarre objects on the pedestals the Notts had set out for public viewing. Gabriel nudged Charlie as they passed in front of a giant’s mandible with some flesh still attached, and glanced pointedly over Charlie’s shoulder.

Charlie followed Gabriel’s gaze and spotted Renard Brown staring intently. Renard looked away quickly when he saw Charlie notice him. Charlie scanned the room and quickly found Tabitha trailing Bill, Ron, and Ginny.

“This is good,” Charlie whispered. “They can’t tail both of us without splitting up, and then we’ll always outnumber them.”

“Well, yes and no,” George said. “Two things. One. They don’t have to beat us in a fight, they just need to get the Bloodwand first. They’re going to let us do the searching for them, because they think we know more than they do. Two,” he glanced around the room for emphasis, “in any room we fight in, everyone is going to side against us by default. So we won’t ever truly outnumber them.”

They fell silent and moved on from the giant’s jaw, and nodded a greeting at a pair of dark suited servants who opened a set of heavy doors into the next room.

It was the Solarium. It had been Theo’s favorite room in the otherwise dead and lifeless mansion. Charlie had never been there himself, but Theo loved to talk about it.

As the rest of the mansion fell into disrepair, the Solarium came more into its own. Cracks in the plaster became places for ivy to take root and climb, reaching ever more towards the glass dome ceiling. Levitating mirrors and lenses drifted lazily through the solarium, catching, redirecting, and focusing shafts of light so plants could thrive in every nook and cranny. They had to duck around plants dangling from chandeliers with blossoms yawning open like mouths, and everywhere they stepped they brushed against others sprouting from gaps in the marble floor. 

In the center of the solarium a set of massive roots as thick as Charlie’s thigh had been trained from octagonal holes in the floor to form a trellis, draped with bright white orchids, filling the room with a rich, buttery smell.

Old Man Nott sat perched in a chair beneath the trellis, buried in a pile of thick wool blankets. Even in the humid Solarium and bundled up in coats and blankets, Cantankerous’ frail and bony frame shook violently from cold. Three other men clustered close to him, heads bent and voices soft and indecipherable. There was a small, plain door behind the trellis. That door had to lead to the private areas of the estate. Sooner or later, they would have to get back there.

Charlie swallowed hard. Cantankerous looked bad, far worse than he’d looked even a couple years ago. Now his once piercing gray eyes were cloudy and sightless. Charlie almost felt guilty. 

“Stop gawking,” George whispered hoarsely. “You’ll make it even more obvious we don’t belong. Also, don’t touch that red flower.”

Charlie nodded, mentally charting a path around the flower George indicated. It had a pattern of yellow and blue veins that looked like a bloodshot eye. 

He looked behind them to see what Renard was up to. He was slowly creeping his way around the perimeter on the opposite side of the Solarium, carefully making his way through a patch of sharp leafed hedges.

“Ah, Renard!” one of Cantankerous’ stooped attendants said, beckoning eagerly. “Have you paid your respects to Mr. Nott yet?”

Renard shot an irritated glare toward Charlie, and slunk over to Cantankerous and his attendants.

“No Father, I have not. Hello, Mr. Nott, congratulations on your son’s wedding.”

“Who is this?” Cantankerous growled, milky eyes searching the air and finding nothing. 

“Renard Brown, sir,” Renard’s father said.

“Theophilius’ boy?”

“No sir,” Renard said, watching Charlie, Gabriel, and George inching steadily toward the back door.

“Julian’s boy?”

“No sir.”

“Nestorius’ boy?”

Renard’s father coughed and straightened his tie. “Renard is my son. Cyril’s son,” he said shakily.

Cantankerous pursed his lips, deepening the wrinkles in his jowls. “Hm. I hope you are not here to take advantage of our wine cellar.”

George snickered loudly. Renard’s gaze flicked back and forth between them and the door leading out of the Solarium. Charlie swallowed hard and smacked aside a gnarled vine reaching toward them. If they could leave Renard behind, they could lose him and search the house with near impunity.

“Do you have a profession, Reginald?”

“No,” Renard snapped, and spun on his heel toward Charlie, Gabriel, and George, murder in his eyes. Cyril grabbed a hold of his arm and pulled him back roughly.

“My son is an appraiser of antiquities and is even now commissioned in the hunt for a particularly rare artifact.”

“Please, father, my patron is a very private individual.”

“Well,” Cantankerous said gruffly, rearing himself up as far as his crooked shoulders would allow. “Best keep your hands in your pockets, boy. Better to have no profession than to be a rummager in another man’s dusty cupboard, fondling his heirlooms.”

“Wow. Dusty cupboard?” George whispered, shaking his head. “I’m guessing Cantankerous didn’t know what Theo was up to in good old Romania?”

“Stop it.”

Gabriel yelped behind them. Charlie swore under his breath. A thick vine had snaked around Gabriel’s leg and bound him tightly. Charlie and George shared a look, and Charlie tripped over a overturned flower pot as they rushed as quickly and quietly as they could to Gabriel’s side.

“I can’t feel my foot!” Gabriel hissed. “My wand is trapped!”

“It’s okay, we can fix this,” Charlie muttered. He pulled out his wand and pointed it at the vine. It cinched tighter. Gabriel gasped, and George pushed Charlie’s wand away.

“Are you kidding? What are you going to do, blast it? In front of all these people?”

“You have a better idea?”

“Just because you only passed one subject doesn’t mean that’s normal. I actually listened in Herbology.”

“You’re a dropout. What do you fucking know?”

“That’s okay, my leg loses circulation all the time,” Gabriel said. “Who needs toes?”

“Listen, this is Irish Constrictor,” George started.

“Don’t you dare give me a latin name, just tell me what to do!”

“Listen, goddammit! I’m about to!”

“Shh! Just do something!”

George rolled his eyes. “Shut up already. You can't cut it. Just uproot it and it’ll panic and let go until it can root itself again. Oh great. Renard’s on the move again. Do you think he’ll hold the door for us?”

Charlie ignored George and followed the vine down Gabriel’s leg and grabbed the first loose loop on the floor he could reach. He immediately learned that Irish Constrictor did not like being grabbed. It twisted and contorted, jerking his hand back and forth. If not for his gloves Charlie was sure the rough bark would have ripped the skin right off his hand. A free length coiled itself around his fist and began to squeeze. Charlie gasped under the crushing pressure. He looked up in time to see Cyril narrow his eyes at them and whisper to one of Cantankerous’ attendants.

“George, we need a distraction,” Charlie growled. It was taking nearly all of his strength and focus to fight the vine clamping around his hand like a vise. The Irish Constrictor reared up form the shrubs for more leverage. It was not small. 

George nodded grimly. His serious expression concerned Charlie more than anything else could have. 

“Renard!” George shouted, waving his arms and bouncing over to Renard and Cyril. “So good to see you! How long has it been?”

“It’s been never.”

Charlie set his boots into a crack in the marble floor and strained against the vine with all of his might. It wound tighter around his fist until it felt like his finger bones would crack. Uprooting the Constrictor was like trying to pull a brick out of a wall.

“Where do I put gifts, Renard? Could you show me?”

“No.”

“Well I certainly appreciate you helping me pick it out.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Reginald, who is this?” Cantankerous croaked.

“It’s Renard, sir.”

“I am George Weasley sir, of the ancient and noble house of Weasley, most ancient and noble of all the ginger bloodlines.”

“Are you mocking me?”

“Oh, no sir, I wouldn’t dream of it. See, my own family has been struggling to get in touch with our ancient roots, and I’m here to learn how to talk all purebloody and shit.”

“Did we invite him? Gregory, did I invite him?”

“I’m afraid so, sir. Your request was to invite all of the families named in the  _ Sacred Nineteen _ .”

Charlie was beginning to feel dizzy from fighting to pull the vine. There was only so much longer he could keep this up, and it looked like Gabriel wasn’t in much better shape.

“Charlie, come on,” Gabriel urged. The vine yanked his leg and pulled Gabriel’s feet out from under him, and the loops began winding further and further up his leg.

“Stupid, fucking weed!” Charlie snarled, and threw all his weight against the vine. He felt a light give, and then he tumbled unceremoniously to the floor in a sprawl as the plant came loose. It immediately released his hand and Gabriel’s leg and snaked back into the brush.

Charlie scrambled to his feet and held out a hand to pull up Gabriel. 

“Thanks, babe,” Gabriel said, dusting off Charlie’s lapel. “I knew you could pull that stupid, fucking weed.”

“Shit,” Charlie said, pointing Gabriel toward George. Cantankerous’ attendants and Cyril had fanned out and formed a loose circle around George.

Gabriel feigned an obnoxiously loud sneeze. 

“Bless you!” Charlie shouted.

George turned back toward them, noticed the attendants, and gave Charlie a barely perceptible nod.

“Well, gentlemen, this has been quite lovely. Now, I expect you’ve many more… friends? To greet? And, great Mr. Nott, if you could be so kind as to consider how you think the new Weasley family crest should read, may I call on you in a fortnight to discuss it further?”

“No.” Cantankerous barked.

“No? Well, if you change your mind, I’d be happy to name my next line of Puking Pastilles after you as payment. I must most humbly beg my leave,” George said, sweeping in a low bow. He shouldered past Renard and made his way through a pair of waxy azalea bushes back to Charlie and Gabriel.

“A fortnight?” Charlie repeated incredulously.

George shrugged. “You’re welcome, by the way. Don’t sniff the fart that distracts, I always say.”

“That’s disgusting. And you never say that.”

“I do now.”

Gabriel nudged Charlie and pointed his chin at Renard, who returned a smoldering glare, but his father’s hand on his shoulder seemed to lock him in place as he engaged one of the attendants in conversation.

“We have an opening. Let’s go,” Gabriel whispered.

George and Charlie nodded and followed him on a rough stone path leading between a set of waist high hedges. Charlie glanced behind him, sighing in annoyance to see the path led back to the where they had entered the Solarium. If they’d only noticed the path earlier, they’d have avoided the Irish Constrictor entirely. 

“Ready,” George asked, his hand on the door. Charlie nodded and followed Gabriel and George into the next room.


	20. Chapter 20

They stepped into a pool room as a tall young man broke a diamond of balls with a satisfying crack. His blonde hair was cut tightly in the style Charlie thought of as “Pureblood Prep School,” and he had surely spent years refining the precise angle at which he held his left eyebrow. He chalked his cue and leaned against the he table.

“And just who invited you?”

This could be none other than Draco Malfoy.

Charlie had never met Draco personally, but Theo never missed an opportunity to whine and complain about Draco “wait until my father hears about this” Malfoy, and his two vacant eyed henchmen. He wondered if Theo knew that Draco was in his precious pool room. The dark brown walls and taxidermied moose on the walls weren’t Theo’s usual aesthetic, but Cantankerous almost never went in there. Apparently Cantankerous was under the impression that two young pureblood men locked in a room with a pool table could get up to nothing untoward. Draco was probably the first person in decades to use the pool table for pool.

“The Greengrasses,” Charlie said at last, tugging his collar looser.

“Really. The Greengrasses,” Draco sneered, narrowing his eyes. “What do you think, Blaise? Think the Greengrasses invited them?”

Blaise shrugged and scowled at the pool table. “Probably. Weasleys are one of the Sacred Families, after all.”

Draco sighed. “Figures. Still, invited or no, wherever your family goes, trouble seems to follow.”

Charlie glanced at Gabriel. “Not looking for trouble. If there’s trouble, I’m telling you right now I sure as hell didn’t bring it.”

Draco squinted at the cue ball, then bent over and telegraphed his shot. “Easy there. I couldn’t begin to care about why you’re here. I’m only here because of Astoria.”

“Splendid!” Gabriel said. “Now, you wouldn’t happen to know if there’s a… I don’t know, historical wand torphy room we could peruse? Normally I don’t come to these things, but I heard through the grapevine that the Notts have quite the collection and I was hoping they might have some on display for the wand buffs to enjoy?”

Draco shared a smirk with Blaise, and Charlie felt felt his face flush with irritation. He stifled the urge to knock their stupid little slicked heads together.

Draco snapped the cue and nodded approvingly as the balls rolled across the table. He flicked a thumb at a door behind him.

“Study’s down the hall.”

The door burst open behind them, and Renard barrelled in with his wand held high.

“Malfoy! These men are imposters!” he panted. “To arms!”

Draco raised his eyebrow even higher. “To arms? Really? Why? If these three are imposters they picked the worst possible disguise.”

“No, I… I don’t mean they’re in disguise,” Renard sputtered. “I mean they’re here to stop the wedding!”

“No, I’m not! We’re not,” Gabriel said. “If we were here to stop the wedding, would I have brought a gift?” Gabriel opened his coat and pointed at the crumpled red bag that had somehow survived being stuffed under his arm.

“Well, that depends. Was your gift a stinkbomb?” Renard retorted.

“That would be distasteful,” Gabriel said crossing his arms.

“Well, what did you bring then?”

“It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you! And I don’t want you trying to take credit for it, not after you trashed my shop and fucking dog eared my book!”

“Gabriel,” Charlie said, tugging his elbow.

“It would only be a surprise if it wasn’t a stinkbomb.” Renard said.

“Fine! I’ll tell you! But only because everyone already saw us carry it in so they know it’s not form your slimy little paws. I got them a set of monogrammed napkin rings!”

“Yeah? I bet they’re enchanted to make napkins smell like shit when you wipe your face with them!”

Blaise took a shot at the pool table and grunted in annoyance. He passed the cue back to Draco.

“Just because everything that touches your face smells like shit doesn’t mean that’s normal!”

Charlie snapped out his wand and threw a stunning spell at Renard, who barely managed to twist out of the way. He shoved Gabriel toward the door Draco indicated, knocking him out of the path of Renard’s counter attack, which lopped an antler off a mounted moose’s head. They scrambled for the door and Gabriel threw it open, a second curse splintering the wall over his shoulder. 

They tumbled into the hallway, Charlie dragging the door closed behind them and George fixing the door shut with a holding charm. 

“You okay?” Charlie asked. Gabriel nodded and leaned into him. The door shuddered behind him from the impact of Renard’s spells, pieces of plaster sprinkling the carpet.

“Does it matter?” Gabriel murmured into his shoulder.

“Yeah. It matters. We can apparate away right now.”

Gabriel smiled and squeezed Charlie’s hand. “Then I’m fine. Let’s go. I don’t want to be here long enough to get used to the smell.”

“I think we just found the first ingredient of the Cantankerous Stinkbomb,” George mused.

Charlie wrinkled his nose. Now that they were away from the side of the house prepared for public viewing, the reek of must was overwhelming. He led Gabriel by the hand down the hallway, dimly lit at odd intervals with crooked iron sconces hanging over faded red doors. The first door was locked.  Charlie shook the knob and a layer of dust and rust drifted to the floor. He shook his head and they walked to the next door. This one was open, but there was nothing inside except a pair of stools draped in brown linen.

They came to a third door and Charlie froze just as he was ready to turn the knob. He could hear faint voices on the other side. It sounded like two women. He slipped his wand into his hand, pressing the length of it against his forearm. 

“Let’s keep going,” Charlie whispered. “We’ll come back.”

“Come in!”

Charlie swore under his breath. George shrugged and motioned for him to open the door. He turned the knob and stepped in.

Where every other room in Nott manor was dark and crammed full of every piece of macabre decor the Notts could dredge up, this space was obviously staged with someone else in mind. A cream colored vanity dominated the far wall, centered between a pair of bright windows. The drapes were clean, striped in black and white. Sprigs of lavender dressed up vases, no doubt to hide the smell. 

A young woman with shoulder length blonde hair leaned back from the mirror, a colored brush bent close to her eyebrow. She twisted in her stool to look over her shoulder.

“Oh. It’s you,” she said, and turned back to the mirror.

Charlie swallowed hard and shared a look with Gabriel. His eyes fell on a tall white bag hanging from a hook on the wall, tied with long red ribbons.

“Daphne. You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

“No,” she said, and dabbed some color onto her cheek.

“You know who I am?”

“Please,” Daphne sighed. Even with her makeup only half done and her hair tied back, she was stunning. Quite a catch, no doubt, for an eligible young bachelor like Theo. “Well, I know he wasn’t with you for your witty banter. Then again, it’s not as though he’s with me for my conversation either.”

“Daphne.”

“Save your breath, Charlie, and my dignity. What did you have in mind, running down the aisle and yelling ‘I object!’ at the right moment? Then he would fly into your arms?” She snapped one bowl of color closed and flipped open another compact. “You got his letter, didn’t you? That if you stay in Romania, he’ll see you for trysts as he always did?”

“Daphne, we’re not here to stop the wedding.”

She snorted. “Really? What are you here for then, the hors d'oeuvres?” 

“I moved on from Theo. That’s in the past.”

Daphne glanced at Gabriel in the mirror, as if noticing him for the first time.

“I see. So, revenge, then? You want to humiliate him in front of his father? At this point, the slightest surprise could put that lobster six feet under.”

George snickered, then disguised it with an awkward cough as Gabriel elbowed him in the side.

“I’m not here for revenge. Well, not against Theo, anyway.”

“Then who? You’re here, so you may as well spill. Otherwise I can scream and the whole house will come running. Talk.”

“Tabitha and Renard Brown.”

Daphne hesitated, the brush halfway into the compact. She slowly spun on her stool to face Charlie and Gabriel. 

“Tabitha and Renard Brown?” she repeated incredulously. 

Charlie nodded.

“They owe you booze money? Late on a gambling debt?”

“They dog eared my book!” Gabriel shouted.

“Must be some book,” she said dryly. 

“They think I came back from Romania to steal the Bloodwand. They’ve attacked both me and Gabriel. So we’re…” Charlie trailed off, unsure if telling her about the Bloodwand was a wise decision. He wasn’t sure there was much point in lying anymore.

“So you’re here to steal it, assuming it’s real and assuming it’s here, so that they don’t use the legendary wand to put you down as soon as they get their hands on it,” she finished.

Charlie scratched his neck sheepishly. “That’s about the size of it, yeah.”

“I see,” she said, and turned back toward the mirror. She held up a pair of eyeliner pencils, then set the thinner one down and bent close to the mirror. 

“Old man Nott has a study, further down the hall, last door on the right. He has a collection of items that he thinks are powerful, valuable, or both. Some of them might actually be, but most are just cheap trinkets with cheaper backstories concocted on the spot by Borgin or Burke when rent was due. He’s got some old looking wands in there. Might be worth your while.”

Charlie looked at Gabriel and nodded, and they moved back toward the hall door. 

“One second,” he told Gabriel.

“Daphne,” he said and knelt at Daphne’s side. “Daphne, you don’t have to do this.”

Daphne snorted. “That’s sweet, Charlie. But I do have to do this. My sister and I are the most precious commodities my father has. After the war, our name was mud, and rightfully so. I’ve no grand delusions about my future prospects. No one will hire any of us who sided with the Death Eaters. We will not be able to secure loans or business licenses. We can either go abroad and hope no one recognizes us, we can stay here and survive on what remains of our family fortunes, or marry those with enough money buried in the backyard to get by.”

“Are you okay with Theo’s arrangement? The one that benefits him and serves all his needs, and fucks us both over? Is that what you want for your life? And if it’s not me, it’ll be someone else soon enough.”

She pursed her lips and applied a dark red stain. “What I want doesn’t especially matter, Mr. Weasley. It’s either this or a life of poverty. At least this way I’ll have a roof and a meal, and I won’t have to spend my life asking forgiveness for I war I did not choose.”

Charlie’s heart sank. “Maybe you’re right. But you’re smart. You’re clever. That’s obvious. And I think you’ll find most folks are more interested in moving on than holding grudges. My brother died, Daphne. He was nineteen years old, and already had a slew of inventions and a thriving business to his name. If he died, and the world is just as bad and hostile and divided as it was before, then his death would mean nothing.”

Daphne said nothing. She screwed the lip stain closed.

Gabriel tugged at Charlie’s elbow. “Come on,” he said softly. “Let’s go.”

Charlie shook his head in disappointment and followed Gabriel back into the hallway. 

George was waiting in the hall with his arms crossed, and checked his watch pointedly. “Convert her from her purebloody ways?” he asked.

“I don’t know what I was expecting.”

“It’s okay,” Gabriel said, glaring at George. “You said your piece. Only she can decide what’s best for her.”

Before Charlie could respond, Gabriel flicked out his wand and reached over Charlie’s shoulder to bat a curse aside. Charlie spun and swore as he pulled out his own wand to block a second yellow blast. Renard had found a friend, an older woman with frizzled gray hair, who was shoulder to shoulder with Renard, and they were advancing quickly down the hall spinning out one curse after another.

“Let’s move!” Charlie yelled, though Gabriel was doing just that, and George was God knows where. They ran down the hall as fast as they could, dodging and deflecting curses whizzing all around them, kicking plaster off the walls and filling the air with the smell of scorched leather.

They tumbled around the corner and Gabriel conjured a billowing cloud of thick, black smoke to fill the hall. Charlie reached back and blindly fired a pair of curses into the smoke. 

“There’s the study!” he said, pointing to the door at the end of the hall. They were within spitting distance.

Gabriel’s conjured smoke quivered, and engulfed them entirely as wind roared around them. Charlie felt Gabriel’s hand find his and squeeze, pulling him away. Charlie let Gabriel lead him and continued shooting aimlessly back toward Renard.

They didn’t get far before a blast of force sent them flying to the floor, splinters of wood and chunks of plaster peppering his face and spraying his eyes. Charlie coughed dust from his lungs and squeezed his irritated eyes shut and a heavy body came crashing down on his back. He grunted in pain and surprise and twisted around, grabbing for a wrist or an elbow before he ended up with a wand shoved in his face. Charlie yelped as teeth clamped down on his hand, and he jerked away.

“Open your eyes, goddammit!”

Charlie did, his eyes watering from the plaster. It was George.

“Sweet baby Jesus,” Charlie breathed. “Where the fuck did you go?”

George flashed a grin and shook his head. “Close, but no newborn messiah.”

“Ron and Ginny?”

“They’ll be along presently,” George said.

A sudden gust of wind roared through the hall, and the smoke and dust vanished as quickly as it had come, and Charlie quickly realized how desperate their position was.

On the Solarium end of the hall, Renard and the gray haired witch stood with their wands outstretched behind them. Tabitha and another young woman with bright red glasses stood between Charlie and the study. 

“I had Potions with you! Elizabeth, get out of here, will you?” George yelled at the young woman beside Tabitha.

“Nothing personal, George,” Elizabeth said, raising her wand.

George shot first - a dazzling burst of blinding color erupting from his wand and soaring toward Tabitha and Elizabeth. Tabitha threw up a glittering shield and Elizabeth disapparated. Charlie fired a hex of his own, but that too bounced off her Tabitha’s shield.

A green blast slammed into Charlie’s stomach and he felt a wave of nausea wash over him and his knees buckled, his ears ringing, a throbbing pinpoint of pain in the small of his back. He slumped to the ground and was only dimly aware of a dizzying crossfire of red and yellow and white curses and counters and bright shields over him, Gabriel and George frantically blocking and dodging and trying to return fire. 

Charlie pushed himself up to all fours, cradling his head in his hands and tried to force air into his lungs. He watched in shock but could do nothing; Gabriel’s face was screwed up in concentration, weaving a complex series of wards to protect the three of them, when a hole appeared in the ceiling. He caught a glimpse of Elizabeth’s face as she pointed her wand through the hole and aimed at Gabriel. Charlie gritted his teeth against the nausea and shot a stunning spell and Elizabeth disappeared with a yelp.

“Brace!” George yelled, pointing his wand straight up. The air seemed to shudder as he rattled off an unfamiliar incantation. The illusion distorted perspective drastically, stretching the walls and flattening the hall, their faces and bodies growing long and narrow. Charlie felt overwhelmed by the sense of wrongness, keenly aware that his eyes were utterly mistaken about the position of his hands and feet. 

Tabitha threw a spell that for one second seemed to be speeding straight between his eyes, then veered to the left and scorched a blistering hole in the faded wallpaper.

Regardless of George’s warning, Charlie threw up.

“Dammit, Charlie, I told you to brace.”

Charlie shook his head and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked up at George, his eyes shifting around on his face.

A door behind Tabitha flew open and cracked George’s illusion, everything snapping back into clear focus. Ginny burst into the hallway swinging her Bludger bat, a gleeful glint in her eye. Tabitha shrieked and disapparated out of the path of Ginny’s bat. Ron piled in the hallway hot on Ginny’s heels and launched a salvo of curses, and Bill behind them neatly traced a glowing glyph in the air and threw it past Charlie and Gabriel.

Renard caught a curse full in the thigh and the gray haired witch stood slack jawed, mesmerized by Bill’s glyph.

“Bill, last door on the right!” Charlie said. Bill nodded and raced to the end of the hall. Gabriel helped Charlie to his feet and held him up as they hobbled after Bill, Ron maintaining a shield behind them to fend off Renard’s meager attacks. Charlie felt a rush of adrenaline purge his nausea; there was no way Tabitha and Renard could get between them and the Bloodwand now. They would have time to search the study and apparate away. 

Bill kicked the door open and they poured into Old Man Nott’s study. Compared to the rest of the house it was quiet and unassuming and probably saw few visitors. A plain and neat wooden desk stood between a pair of bookshelves. A bronze astrolabe sat on one side of the desk and a large magnifying glass floated over the other. Bill locked the door behind them.

Charlie did a quick count of the wands he could see. Four glass display mounts on the walls with three wands each, plus a handful of others floating on bookshelves and on the fireplace mantle.

“Gabriel, I think it’s up to you now,” Charlie said quietly. “And Ginny, for the love of Christ, don’t hit that!”

“Okay, Gramps,” Ginny said, lowering her bludger bat away from the magnifying glass.

Gabriel straightened his glasses and examined the display mounts on the wall, tapping his lip and scowling. Meanwhile, Bill slowly circled the room, muttering incantations and drawing symbols in the air, and George cast a series of wards on the door.

“What do you think?” Charlie asked, leaning close to Gabriel.

Gabriel shrugged. “At first glance, not a single one of these wands is even remotely old enough to be the Bloodwand. This collection dates back 125, 150 years at most.”

Charlie’s heart sank. “So that means…”

“Could mean it doesn’t exist, or that Nott doesn’t have it, or that it’s just not in this room. None of these are great possibilities for our present circumstances.”

The door rattled on its hinges, flexed and warped, then returned to its original shape as George’s wards fought off a series of spells.

“Come back later! I’m not dressed yet!” George shouted through the door. He turned and flashed a grin. “Wards are holding.”

“So what then?” Charlie asked.

Gabriel said nothing, and continued moving around the study examining one wand after the other, careful to touch nothing.

“Hey… guys?” Ron said timidly.

“Quiet Ron, Give him some time,” Charlie snapped. 

“Time is something we definitely don’t have right now. Look!”

Charlie sighed irritably and turned to see what Ron was so concerned about. The astrolabe on Nott’s desk was revolving lazily.

“Probably just some toy or trinket,” Charlie said, though he didn’t believe it.

“I don’t think Nott’s the type to have a child’s toy in his personal office,” Ron countered. The astrolabe spun faster and began to glow. With a flash, tiny beacons of light shot out in all directions.

“Ooh, it’s the night sky,” Gabriel said, pointing out Ursa Major as it passed over the fireplace and rotated onto the ceiling.

“I take it back,” Ron said, scratching his chin. “Child’s toy.”

Lines connected the stars of Ursa Major, Minor, and Draco, glowing a bright blue. They wiggled and twisted, then popped off the wall and morphed into two phantasmal bears and a ghostly dragon.

“Shit,” Charlie said, and the blue constellation beasts dived forward, snarling silently.

He ducked as the dragon flew toward him, and everyone started casting curses, jinxes, and hexes, shattering glass displays and scattering wands and books as their spells tore harmlessly through the constellations. 

The dragon grabbed Charlie’s ankle and tossed him across the room, time slowing as he helplessly watched the bears tackle Ron and George. George’s wand went flying through the air as it pounded him into the dingy carpet. Charlie crashed into the wall.

The fireplace roared to life and erupted with green flame, belching Tabitha and Renard into the study. Charlie weakly lifted his wand and shot a stunning spell, his ears ringing from the impact of his fall, but Tabitha batted it away. Renard summoned George’s wand to his hand and slipped it into his pocket with a grin.

Charlie used a bookshelf to pull himself to his feet and the dragon wheeled on Ginny and wrapped her up in its long tail and sinuous torso, pinning her arms to her sides. The Ursa bears held Bill and Ron under their immense shoulders, unfazed by their desperate squirming. George ducked under the desk and grabbed a display wand rolling near his head and pointed it at Tabitha, but nothing more than a useless stream of red sparks spurted from the end. Gabriel leapt up from behind the easy chair, rapid firing curses with a wand in each hand.

Tabitha spun up a dense shield, deflecting Gabriel’s shots into the fireplace, knocking out chunks of mortar and brick. She fired back and caught him hard in the chest with a disarming spell, knocking him into a bookshelf and crumpling to the floor.

Finally Charlie shook free of the mental fog and raised his wand, but the starry dragon lashed out from where it was constricting Ginny, smashing him back into the wall and sending his own wand flying. He slumped against the wall, struggling to breathe.

Gasping, he looked around and took stock of their situation. Bill, Ron, and Ginny were held in place by the constellation beasts, Gabriel was disarmed and dazed, and George was trying to pull himself to his feet, one leg unresponsive. 

Tabitha and Renard picked their way around the Weasley’s, grabbing loose wands off the floor from where they’d fallen. They paused in front of Charlie and Renard handed the wands he’d picked up to Tabitha. He rubbed his knuckles and punched Charlie in the jaw with a sharp crack. His ears ran and he slid back to the ground. Things had turned against them, quickly.

“These two…” Tabitha said slowly, holding a pair of wands close to her face, “these are the two Ollivander was using…”

“One must be the Bloodwand!” Renard hissed. “This one looks older. It must be this one.”

Tabitha shook her head. “You’re wrong. It’s this one.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll take them all back to Gregorovitch and have the proper one authenticated, and blame the theft on this lot,” Renard said, gesturing towards Bill, Ron, and Ginny as they squirmed underneath the ghostly bears and dragon. 

“Gregorovitch!” Gabriel repeated incredulously, his glasses askew. “Gregorovitch couldn’t tell a wand from a teapot, much less a 14th century wand from a 15th!”

“Your opinion doesn’t matter!” Renard snapped, his face flushing a dark red.

“Maybe it does,” Tabitha said, her hand on Renard’s shoulder. “Fine, Ollivander, you tell us which one it is. If you don’t, we’ll kill one Weasley at a time until there aren’t any left.”

“Wait a second, they’re war heroes. We can’t just kill them!”

Tabitha rolled her eyes. “Come on, Renard, we can’t go back now. They came and attacked us! They started all this! Charlie came all the way from Romania to interfere, do you think they’ll let this go that easily? They’ll never let this go.”

“Can’t you just obliviate them or something?”

“Renard, you can’t just obliviate months of someone’s memory.”

A twitch of movement in a decorative vase of olive branches behind Gabriel caught Charlie’s attention. It had to be a mirage, desperation and dizziness making him see things that couldn’t be real.

“Listen Renard, there’s no going back. They pushed us to this… do you really want to go back to that shack empty handed, knowing we’ll be hunted by these people, who have all the money and fame they could possibly need? Here. Use George’s wand, and they won’t be able to trace it back to us.”

They locked eyes and Renard nodded.

Tabitha turned back to Gabriel and Renard leveled George’s wand at Ginny. “Last Chance, Ollivander. Tell us which is the Bloodwand!”

“I don’t know!”

“One.”

“I have to examine them properly, I haven’t had time!”

“Two!”

There it was again, a twitch of movement behind Gabriel. Could Tabitha really not see it? No, Gabriel was blocking her view. 

“I’m sorry!” Gabriel sputtered, tears streaming down his face. “None of these look old enough!”

“Three!”

Renard bit his lip and turned toward Ginny, still crushed helpless beneath the Ursa bear, her bright red hair spilling onto the dull carpet. No, not Ginny, she was the baby. She jerked back and forth, trying futilely to free herself.

“Avada…”

Charlie willed his body to move, to run toward Ginny, but he was moving too slow, like he was deep in a vat of molasses. 

“Kedavra!” Renarard screamed, closing his eyes and snapping the wand at Ginny.

There was no flash of green. Just a faint, high pitched whistle. 

Then the whistle deepend into a low, ripping fart.

Renard stood slackjawed, staring at George’s wand. George’s Fartmaster.

“I thought you had to say Fartos for it to fart?”

“That’s the 3000! It farts no matter what you say!”

Charlie grabbed a book and whipped it at the shelf behind Gabriel. 

“Gabriel, behind you!” Charlie shouted, praying his aim was good. 

It was. The book spun toward the shelf and knocked a wand free of a display and tumbling toward Gabriel. The wand grew, twisted, and warped until it resembled a curved branch a storm had just knocked loose. Leaves sprouted at odd intervals, quivering as they reached out toward Gabriel as if they were searching for the sun. 

Gabriel turned and saw the wand branch, recognition flashing across his face. He extended a hand toward the branch, roots growing and grasping back toward him. His fingers closed around the curve in the branch and the roots curled around his forearm.

“Of course,” he said, eyes wide, “it’s a fucking… olive branch … shaped into a wand.”

Gabriel shrieked as the Bloodwand’s roots sank into his arm, his veins bulging and contorting all the way to his bicep. Wispy twigs grew into vines and spiraled up his arm and locked around his shoulder and neck, forming an armored collar of silvery bark shielding his throat and the wand side of his face. His eyes turned dark green. It was difficult to tell where the Bloodwand ended and Gabriel began. Leaves fanned out, waving toward the constellation bears and dragon, and suddenly they were gone, sucked into the leaves and fueling the growth of the bark shield.

Somehow Tabitha summoned the presence of mind to fire a hex at the unshielded side of Gabriel’s body. Gabriel and the Bloodwand moved in a blur to interpose the mass of bark and absorbed the curse. The Bloodwand and its roots and vines pulsed with the influx of energy, and the bark spread and grew another handspan to cover Gabriel’s chest and face. 

“Expelliarmus!” Gabriel boomed, and the room rattled and a gust of wind scattered papers and books.

Renard narrowly raised a shield charm, but Gabriel’s blast punched a hole in the glimmering shield and Renard’s wand exploded in a cloud of light and splinters. Tabitha and Renard screamed in terror and ducked beneath a second spell, which soared over their heads and ripped a head sized hole through the study wall, the wall in a store room behind that, and into a pantry on the other side of the store room with a crash of shattering ceramics. 

Tabitha and Renard looked at Gabriel, the freed Weasleys, back at each other, and screamed again, then apparated away. 


	21. Chapter 21

The Burrow hadn’t had an addition in a long time, not since Ginny had been born. It had taken some time to clean up Nott’s study, but it turned out to be a calm and centering space when it wasn’t covered in dust and rubble and full of constellation monsters come to life, not to mention cash strapped pureblood cousins on a heist gone horribly awry. Bill had recoded the astrolabe so it now saw the Weasleys as friendly. Gabriel was currently hard at work confiscating all of the books that he found interesting, which so far meant all of the books in the study. Charlie leaned back in Cantankerous’ buttered leather armchair with the Prophet on his knee, trying not to stare too hard at the Bloodwand dangling from Gabriel’s belt, which had reverted to the unassuming form of an olive branch. An olive branch wand for an Ollivander. 

Fortunately Cantankerous wouldn’t be able to report most of the books stolen without admitting he owned some questionable titles in the first place, and it probably wasn’t worth the trouble. The astrolabe and the books weren’t technically stolen, not intentionally, anyway. Who could have predicted that when Gabriel apparated them away from Nott manor, the Bloodwand, still humming with power drained from Tabitha’s curse and the constellation monsters, the apparition spell would teleport the entire study as well as all six of them.

Molly and Arthur had been reticent at first, but once everyone realized the implausibility of reenergizing the Bloodwand and reversing the removal of the study back to Nott Manor, it quickly began to feel like it had always been there. 

“Any luck?” Charlie asked.

Gabriel shook his head, setting another book on his keep pile. “Not yet. I’m not really expecting to find anything in Nott’s library if it wasn’t in mine, to be honest. It’s just… so weird. I mean, the Bloodwand is an olive branch, so that makes it seem likely that the Ollivanders’ are the family it’s bonded to, but, you know, we’re not exactly a blood line in the traditional sense, so it really shouldn’t work for me at all. Well, that’s not true. It should work for me as a standard wand, but all that … other stuff, really shouldn’t be accessible to me.”

“Maybe whoever made it was worried about people like Tabitha and Renard taking advantage of a technicality to seize the wand. Maybe whoever made it felt like you should get to choose your family.”

The door burst open and George charged in, his face red and sweat beading on his brow.

“Ollivander!” he roared, fists clenched at his sides.

Charlie sighed and rubbed his forehead. He’d hoped that after everything George would let his contrived spat with Ollivander go.

“I’m gonna need the Bloodwand,” George demanded.

Gabriel raised an eyebrow and glanced at Charlie for an explanation. Charlie shrugged.

“Why?” Gabriel asked.

“That guy from Eyelops trained his owls to shit on my storefront.”

“He did not,” Charlie said, looking back to the Prophet and turning the page. He scanned the socials section and then froze, and read an article in the gossip corner for the first time.

It seemed the missing study was not the only thing which vanished from Nott Manor; Daphne Greengrass never stepped foot in the Chapel, never married Theo Nott, and had just now been sighted in Morocco on a crosscountry broom trip, and would memorializing her salacious adventures around the globe in a new column for  _ Witch Weekly _ . 

“He did! My storefront is covered in shit. Scat. Dung. Feces.”

“And you’re not okay with that?” Gabriel asked, frowning. “I thought scatological humor was your thing.”

“Which reminds me,” George huffed angrily. “We need to go back to Nott Manor.”

“We’re not going back to Nott manor,” Charlie said. He folded up the Prophet and set it on the desk.

“Really, Gabriel, how do you suffer this negativity? He says no to everything.”

“Not everything.”

“Ew! Gross, Charlie. Anyway, Tabitha and Renard may not have the Bloodwand, but they have something far more valuable! They have the Fartmaster 3000 prototype!”

“Why did you bring that with you, anyway?”

“Um, you’re welcome? Now are you coming with me or no?”

Gabriel put another book on the wobbly keep pile and Charlie shook his head.

“Fine. Well, I have to get those into production ASAP, before Tabitha and Renard beat me to it,” George said, zipping up his coat. “Unless, that is, you lot will help me track them down and get it back?”

“No!” Gabriel and Charlie said in unison.

“Blood traitors, both of you,” George grumbled, and disapparated.

Charlie reached over and squeezed Gabriel’s shoulder. 

“If it makes you feel better, Gabriel, once George starts placing unrealistic demands on your time, you’re family.”

“Thanks,” Gabriel said. He looked at Charlie and smiled. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to everyone who stuck with me! 
> 
> Especially my beta, jamiewritesfanfic, who had to endure many fart jokes at Ron's expense. I love you.


End file.
